


From the Incomprehensible Depths of the Ninth Dimension (of My Heart)

by Omnicat



Series: Pumpkin Spice Lemons [4]
Category: Timeless (TV 2016)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Domestic Bliss, During Canon, Enthusiastic Consentacles, F/M, Femsub?, Hurt/Comfort, Lemon, Lovecraftian Fluffball Garcia Flynn, Lovecraftian Monster(s), Multiple Penetration, Porn With Plot, Porn Without Plot, Post-Canon, Pre-Canon, Tentacle Bondage
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-10-07
Updated: 2020-10-25
Packaged: 2021-03-07 18:35:51
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 23,970
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26882272
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Omnicat/pseuds/Omnicat
Summary: Lorena Flynn’s friends and neighbors don’t think much of her husband, always disappearing on ‘classified’ jobs with little to no notice and leaving her all alone in that big house in the dunes. Lorena would love to defend him better, but manifestations of amorous telepathic shadow tentacles from another dimension tend to raise more questions than they answer.One domestic scene derailed by porn per chapter, featuring:1) Apple Pie, tentacles and foodplay2) Laundry Day, tentacles and outdoor sex3) New Baby, tentacles and sleepy sex4) Laundry Day Redux, tentacles and washing machine masturbation5) Rittenhouse, tentacles with sensory deprivation and semi-public sex plus actual plot and FEELINGS6) #@%!ing Roommates, not many tentacles but a lot of cockblocking comedyand more to come!
Relationships: Flynn & Lorena & Iris, Flynn & Lorena & the Bunker Team, Lorena/Flynn
Series: Pumpkin Spice Lemons [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1946326
Comments: 30
Kudos: 26





	1. Apple Pie

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [A Shoggoth on the Roof](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=plVfLd0fyTw). No actual knowledge of Lovecraft or the wider Chtulhu Mythos is necessary to understand this fic, by the way. I'm working entirely off of osmosis, wikipedia, and artistic license myself. :P

Lorena Flynn could bake apple pies in her sleep. She’d been making them since her older brother’s sixth birthday, when she’d climbed on top of a kitchen chair to see what her mother was doing and got to measure out cups of flour and sugar and teaspoons of salt and cinnamon and nutmeg. Nothing told her primitive monkey brain _‘home’_ like the smell of sweet dough and spices and fresh apples parts. There was a rhythm and familiarity to it that grounded her. Mix the dough. Cut up apples. Mix the filling. Roll the dough. Fill the pan. Go nuts on an aesthetically pleasing top crust, or just cut up strips of dough and go with the traditional grid pattern. Hum that one song the radio had gotten stuck in her head that week for half an hour straight.

Easy. Comforting. Tasty. A staple of her good dreams the way suddenly realizing she’d forgotten to file her taxes and would be shunned from her profession forevermore was a staple of the bad ones. All things she could use this month.

Fortunately, the shadow tentacles that interrupted her baking had all the same qualities.

Yes, including ‘tasty’. They originated from a dimension the human mind had no way to reliably observe, interpret, and comprehend. In order to manifest in a way Lorena could comfortably wrap her head around and interact with, they had to be assigned ‘decoy’ physical characteristics anyway. So once you were giving them weight, texture, a temperature, surface tension, tensile strength, a warning noise, and what have you, why _not_ make them taste good too? Obviously, apple pie flavored tentacles would just be weird, but their owner was secure enough in both his masculinity and her love for him to indulge in her equal fondness for the taste of pussy.

As well as her desire for a distinctive ringtone. So when the opening to _A Shoggoth on the Roof_ started playing from thin air, Lorena was not at all surprised when it was followed by a shimmering, quasi-corporeal burgundy tentacle drifting into her field of vision. Nor was there anything unusual about the bone-melting sense of relief and the rush of heat to the junction of her legs that came with the aforementioned. It was Pavlovian, at this point.

"Hey, you," she said, reaching for the tentacle with a flour-covered hand. "It’s been two days. Where were you? Are you okay?"

 _Busy,_ the tentacle said. _But fine. I’m sorry I worried you._

It curled around her hand, and most of her forearm besides. Clung to it, really. It must have been a very long or very hard time on his end. Damn interdimensional time twisting. She cradled her tentacle-wrapped hand to her cheek and nuzzled into it. It was almost liquid at first, fluid and uncertain, but the longer they connected, the more solid and real it became. She pressed a kiss to it where it encircled the inside of her wrist. The narrow tip caressed her cheek like a human hand would have. While the end slithered beyond her arm to tangle into the curls of her hair, the lower half wound around the rest of her, spiraling from below her breasts to between her knees.

 _How are you, honey?_ Garcia asked her, giving her an affectionate tentacle squeeze from the ninth dimension.

"Tell me how _you_ are and I might be able to make up my mind about that."

As she spoke, she started gathering up her knives and other sharp utensils, one-handedly rolled them in a towel, and put the towel in the cutlery drawer.

There was a pause as he tried to translate across the dimensional barrier. _Tired. Cold. Burning too bright. It’s manageable, and we’ve made a lot of progress. But I’m frustrated. Rumor has it this conflict started almost a millennium from now._

"That’s weird. A thousand years is an absurdly long time for a conflict to wage without you guys hearing about it." Then her brain caught up with her ears, and she froze with her glass measuring cup halfway to the sink. "Wait, a thousand years _into the future?_ "

 _Exactly._ She felt a great surge of appreciation and relief that she shared his jumbled emotions.

"But time over there works the same way it does here, doesn’t it? The speed of the car notwithstanding, it’s a one-way street for both of us."

_That’s always been our understanding, yes. We might be dealing with beings that operate on yet another dimension._

"Or the inventors of a time machine," she said, handing one of his tentacles her bowl of sliced apples to put in the fridge.

_Or that. But things have been looking up since we learned there might be outside meddling involved. So I’m trying to ignore the potential of a huge, sudden gap in my understanding of all worlds until the others find out more. Your turn._

"I can’t say that’s exactly comforting to hear, but if you think things are moving in the right direction, and you’re holding up okay in the meantime, I’m okay too," Lorena said.

 _Good._ His voice, incorporeal though it may be, turned hoarse. _I’ve missed you, Lorena._

Everything she might hurt herself on if she slipped or it fell put away somewhere safe? Check and check. Not that Garcia had ever let her get hurt before, but she wasn’t about to make keeping it that way harder on him.

She reached under her apron and pulled at her pale pink blouse until most of the snap fasteners gave way; undid the button of her slacks. "I’ve missed you too."

The single, big tentacle he had her wrapped up in vanished like smoke. In its place, a dozen more materialized from the tiled floor all around her. The first one stretched all the way up and bumped into her cheek as if in a kiss. Then it reached back, rolled around her hair, and yanked her head back. Lorena gasped in delight.

Two other tentacles crept under her apron and into her blouse and wound around her breasts. She hadn’t worn a bra all weekend, waiting for this exact moment. The loops squeezed, while the ends kneaded and prodded. When one tentacle plucked her nipple, Lorena grabbed the edge of the counter to steady herself.

A tentacle around each wrist bound her hands in place, and two more grabbed and repositioned her ankles. Yet another pair pulled her hips back, tugged on either side of the top of her slacks until the zipper opened all the way, and drew them halfway down her thighs, followed by her panties: unmistakably presenting for the taking. Experimentally, she strained against Garcia’s hold. The tentacles didn’t budge. All she accomplished was the one in her hair pulling her head back further. A new tentacle wrapped around her throat: not tightening, but snug enough to make it impossible to ignore.

Lorena moaned in anticipation, her pussy slick and throbbing.

In most other aspects of her life, a sense of helplessness was one of the last things she enjoyed. Insecurity and inability had a way of squeezing the air from her lungs and casting a grey sheen over even the brightest of days. But when a swarm of tentacles wrapped around her limbs and took control of her body away from her, it was a release. She couldn’t be with him while he was putting his life on the line in an interdimensional war, but she could let him take care of her while he was gone. Just like he could only ever hope his missions and battles would yield their desired results and not claim too many losses no matter how he bled and struggled in that other dimension, but in this one, his success – her cooperation and satisfaction – was basically guaranteed. Wrapping her head to toe in tendrils of himself and fucking her with them until she couldn’t see straight was Garcia’s version of baking apple pies.

It had been longer than usual, so he didn’t waste time once he had her in position. Two tentacles ran down her spine, pinched the globes of her ass, and crept down between her cheeks and back up between her lips. They looped around her thighs, and then yet another one found her clit, and another her entrance. She felt the first of these split and thin before applying pressure around her sensitive nub. The second was slick.

Long live flexible physical translations of extradimensional characteristics. He couldn’t manifest as a couch or a car or anything, but he had a lot of room for interpretation when it came to ‘long, thin, prehensile appendages’.

He pressed inside, parting her in a hot, wet slide. Lorena let out a harsh breath, mouth falling open. When he pulled back and started thrusting in and out, the tentacles holding her breasts began squeezing to the same rhythm, and the one on her clit joined in too, rubbing firmly and pinching ever so gently. And all the others, the ones encircling her limbs, holding them in place, throbbed as if to just remind her they were there. The friction, the constriction, it was almost perfect. Lorena felt an urge to move, to fuck and not just be fucked, but she couldn’t. He restrained every part of her she could have used to do so.

"Honey, please," she whimpered.

So instead, he moved her body for her.

The one tentacle pumped into her, and the two holding her thighs pulled her back. Once, twice, and on and on. _Now_ it was perfect. Her hips thrust back into the ‘penis’ tentacle, and she tried to move them the other way solely to feel him refuse her and stay the course. She tossed her head, and the loop around her neck tightened in ‘warning’. Breathless laughter escaped her. She was trapped in a cage made of tentacles – surrounded and penetrated by the living bars of his phantom body, pinned into place and used as they pleased – and it was everything she’d hoped and needed it to be.

God, sometimes she hated his job so much, hated the danger and the alien challenges he faced, hated the erratic pseudo-time dilation between the dimensions, hated how hard it always seemed to be for him to communicate while he was there, hated the simple loss of waking up to the sight of his face every morning and falling asleep to the sound of his breathing every night.

This... didn’t make up for all that, exactly. But it was certainly a hell of a distraction.

The tentacles fucked her good and steady, filling her up physically and emptying her out mentally. As her pleasure built, spreading like mist through her entire body and thickening by the thrust, the stress and tension that had filled her before dissolved. The tentacles moved her body for her, pleasured the both of them for her, and left her own muscles to turn to jelly. All she had to do, all she _could_ do, was surrender and enjoy herself. So that was what she did.

He fucked into her harder and faster but flicked her clit less, shifting the balance of ‘pure sensation’ and ‘fast track to orgasm’ toward the former. Lorena keened. Her instinct was to curl in on herself. He obliged – in a way. The tentacle around her throat tugged her down, and the one in her hair untangled itself only to return as a weight between her shoulder blades. Between the two of them, her elbows buckled. The tentacles around her wrists let go and hovered above the counter...

 _Would you dislike it terribly if I made a mess right now and left you to clean it up?_ he asked. He drove into her especially hard and deep, leaving her to scrabble at the countertop and smearing her hands through streaks of spilled flour and sugar.

Lorena hung her head and squeezed her eyes shut. "Ah! Only if you – oh, _oh_ – stopped fucking me before I – I –"

One of the hesitant tentacles promptly knocked over her bag of flour, white powder billowing all over the counter. The other untied the strings holding her apron up. It fell away, followed, after one last (and suddenly slimy) fondle, by the tentacles around her breasts.

Garcia didn’t say another word, but Lorena was dead certain she could hear him biting his tongue as it clicked for her what he was about to do – and did it: pushed between her shoulder blades until Lorena’s upper body thumped to the counter, her sticky tits planting right smack in the middle of the mess of flour.

The main tentacle’s next, shuddering thrust punched a burst of laughter out of her. "Garcia, _what on Earth?_ "

 _Change your mind about the mess?_ he quipped, extremely innocently.

"No, but what _is_ this?"

 _Humor me._ One of the freed up tentacles rolled through the flour like a piece of schnitzel being breaded, and brushed her cheek. _Please._

 _I’ll humor you so hard I’m not even going to ask,_ she thought, too preoccupied with not laughing out loud to form words.

 _I love you,_ he said, equal parts sheepish and eager. He smeared more flour across her cheek and down her throat. _So much._

"I’ll take a picture when we’re done," she managed to promise with a straight face. "Now please – _hmng_ – oh, honey, please, make me come already."

He made a wordless noise of agreement, and even as his free tentacles coated themselves in flour before winding around her throat and forearms again, the piston of his dicktacle into her intensified another notch. Aided by her tenta-wrappings, Lorena braced herself with one hand against the back wall and the other splayed against the countertop. She rested her forehead in the flour, blew a patch of counter clean so she wouldn’t be breathing the stuff in, and collapsed under the onslaught of pleasure. The mess was getting in her hair, but whatever, she needed a shower now anyway.

One tentacle slithered through the flour, brushing along her cheek, between her breasts, down her stomach, and between her legs. It replaced the other tentacle working her clit. Lorena didn’t even get a chance to react to that before she yelped at the shock of renewed sensation. The tentacles around her thighs spread her wider and shoved her into the big one harder and faster, over and over. The floury tentacle writhed against her face and between her breasts with every movement on her clit. She cried out, again and again, until it was just one long, hitching wail interrupted only by the jarring impact of the tentacle pounding into her.

Finally, orgasm tipped her over the edge. Every muscle in her body tightened at once, her voice cutting off, her fists balling, her toes curling, and her pussy clenching. She wasn’t sure she breathed while it lasted. Garcia fucked her through it until the end, not slowing down or stopping until her pussy let go of him again.

The only thing that kept her upright as she caught her breath was him. Eventually, he lowered her gently to the nice cool tile of the kitchen floor. The tentacles lost their appearance of solid mass, and then disappeared back from whence they came entirely. Lorena heaved a huge, contented sigh and stretched.

"Thanks, honey," she said.

 _No, thank_ you. _I’ll get in touch again as soon as I can. I love you._

"Love you too."

‘As soon as he could’, she knew, could mean weeks for him. Even months, as this particular visit showed. But for her? _A Shoggoth on the Roof_ reached her ears again just a little over three hours later.

Lorena grinned and bit her lip around a mouthful of perfect apple pie, and reached for the fastenings of her slacks.

Garcia’s absences weren’t always like this – Lorena wanted the imaginary audience she conjured in times like these to be very clear on that. He’d been a warrior for as long as she’d known him, and she never would have married him if his ‘deployments’ always got to her so badly. Literally and figuratively mind-blowing sex or no (and, also for the record, that wasn’t what ninety percent of their interdimensional interactions had _started out_ as being, either, just the form of communication and connection that proved most fulfilling, given everything), she wouldn’t have been able to handle life with him if they did.

 _Sometimes_ the sex was the only thing keeping her sane until Garcia’s return. Usually it was a little bit of that, but mostly a whole lot of fun. Sometimes, the worst emotion she had time to develop between being fucked into oblivion over and over was guilt for what an uneven trade it was.

The start of Lorena and Garcia’s relationship – which was not, as far as Lorena was concerned, the first time they met, or their first date, or their first kiss, or the first time they articulated their feelings for each other out loud, no, all those things were permanently recontextualized by The Reveal – had gone something like this:

Lorena: "I may be a Catholic, but I’m a modern woman too. I want to make love to you. Bow chica wow wow."

Garcia: "Awesome, me too. But there’s something you should know first."

Lorena: "Gosh, I wonder what that could – OH SWEET JESUS MARY AND JOSEPH, MY EYES. MY EARS. MY PRIOPERCEPTION. WHAT IS HAPPENING."

He’d taken her all the way to see his ancestral home in Croatia for it. She hadn’t thought much of that phrasing at the time, ‘ancestral home’, but afterward? Hoo, boy. No wonder they kept the place in the family.

She’d felt the air change when they entered the grounds, and wondered at it. But something about _him_ had grown even more different as he crossed that invisible boundary, turned wild and strange even before he actively did anything, and... god, Lorena couldn’t put her finger on it at all. And _then_ he did The Thing.

The best way Garcia himself could find to describe something so obvious to him was ‘pulling the other half of himself into this facet of existence’. Lorena took to comparing it to him dropping trou and whipping out his dick. Not because of any of the connotations of the action, but because of the sheer physical reality of it. After all, if you didn’t already know what to expect, looking at the crotch of a man’s jeans did not prepare you in the slightest for what emerged when he removed it: the floppy, veiny appendage, the bizarre knob on the end, the inexplicable construction of two balls in a wrinkly flesh sack – and the _hair_.

("Wow, thanks for that blow to my masculinity," he’d laughed.)

Except when Garcia leveled up the number of dimensions he manifested himself on in the version of the world Lorena inhabited, she wasn’t sure she ever actually _saw_ it. Sometimes, she thought she might have been able to hear the taste of his flesh, see his body temperature, feel the color of his skin move as if it was a part of her own body. Other times, she was sure his presence just dunked her brain straight into a vat of psychedelic substances.

That first time, the experience took her completely off guard. Something appeared around him, seeming like one kind of incomprehensible Thing at first, but then changing, and changing again, like a radio being tuned in. But the right frequency kept eluding him, or her, or maybe both of them, the entity constantly slipping around and away from explicable, if it was in fact getting anywhere close at all. Trying to take it in gave Lorena a headache. By the time he ‘covered himself back up’, her nose was bleeding and Garcia couldn’t stop apologizing for overdoing it as he dabbed at her face with a handkerchief. Lorena had to lie down on the dusty floor for a bit to make the world stop spinning.

"Oh my god," she panted once she’d regained enough breath for it. Her eyes found his deceptively ordinary handsome-young-guy face, and she crossed herself. "Oh my god!"

He grimaced at the gesture, but it seemed more of an emotional response than anything (meta)physical. Which, come to think of it, gave her an idea. Lorena beaconed him close, pulled her crucifix necklace out from under her shirt, and poked him in the cheek with it.

Nothing happened.

"Huh," she said.

Looking supremely confused, he took the little ornate cross from her and angled it to catch more of the light filtering in through the cracks in the window shutters.

"It’s pretty?" he tried. "My father wore one too, but his had a tiny Jesus nailed to it. Always thought that was a little morbid, personally."

Lorena heaved a huge sigh of relief and relaxed into the dust. "Well, that’s okay then."

Garcia looked like he was worried he’d given her a stroke or something.

"If that doesn’t make you burst into flames or _at least_ cause you a nasty burning sensation, you’re obviously not evil incarnate or anything," she explained.

That made him smile, tentatively relieved, though he did say: "I really don’t think my existence is proof that god or hell or whatever exists, you know. Just that people like _me_ exist."

"Oh, of course not. The whole point of believing in god is that you’re supposed to do it absent any actual evidence. I’m just saying. If there _is_ a god, and he _has_ imbued this symbol with power, and if that means there are such things as capital-G good and capital-E evil, then you’re fine. No Evil detected." She held out her hands, and he helped her get to her feet and wobble over to an ancient sofa covered in plastic. "There are no cosmic warning signs telling me to beware of you. I get to decide for myself if I should or not."

"And do you?" he asked hopefully.

She squeezed his hands and assured him: "No. But I won’t lie, I’m a little stunned. I think I need a minute."

"Of course, of course."

"What _was_ that, Garcia?"

"Me. The full extent of my... my being."

"What are you, then? You look so normal now."

"I’m human. I’m not putting up a front about that. I look like this to you because this is how I look here. My family has always just... had more to it than that, too. You know how the world is said to exist in four dimensions? Horizontal, vertical, depth, and time? It doesn’t, really. There are untold dimensions we’re just not aware of, because we... only passively exist in any but the first four, so to speak. My family – my people and I – actively exist in nine dimensions. But the latter four don’t... I don’t even know, don’t show up well in action or something, within the first four. For others, at least. I’m fine, but most human brains haven’t evolved to process them. There would have been no point. And the fifth dimension basically means moving between different facets of physical reality. Like this."

One moment he was there, and the next, reality rippled and warped around him, and he was gone. In the time it took for Lorena’s mouth to fall open, he’d come back.

"Did you just – turn invisible, or – ‘different facets’? – how does that work?"

"No invisibility, the dimensions of my body you’re used to perceiving literally, physically left. I moved myself into a different dimension, or realm, or world, or whatever you want to call it, just like I moved the other parts of me into this one earlier. But I can only do it in places like this, where there’s a membrane missing from the barrier between the worlds."

"Does this –" Lorena gestured up and down his body. "– give people migraines on that side too? Wait, _are_ there people on the other side other than you?"

"Yes, there are. That other facet of Earth is almost as crowded as this one. The only thing that’s rare is people like me, who can inhabit both. And yes, this me messes with their heads as badly as the other me messed with yours. When I unleash the raw version on them, at least."

"Raw? As opposed to what? Boiled? Grilled? Steamed?"

Garcia laughed. "I can... translate myself into a more easily digestible format, so to speak."

Lorena’s ears perked up. "Really?"

"Like putting on a space suit, except for your benefit instead of mine."

"That sounds cumbersome."

"Surprisingly, no. Once I get the hang of a trick like that, it’s like riding a bike. It becomes second nature. Very easy. Really. Completely painless, too," he went on, and on, not understanding her ever-widening eyes.

"So why didn’t you show me your space suit in the first place?!" she burst out.

Garcia clasped her hands and very earnestly said: "Because it by definition paints a distorted picture of me, and I wanted you to know the _truth_."

Lorena’s love for him ended right then and there – rebooting into something even stronger. "Thank you, Garcia. That’s... I really appreciate that. But I’d like to see the space suit too, if you don’t mind? I don’t know if you’d noticed yet, but I’m super nosey. I always want to know _everything_. And so far, it feels like the only thing I’ve learned is that I don’t know anything at all."

He grinned fit to burst. "I had noticed. And I love that about you."

So he showed her his tentacles for the first time. And maybe it was the last vestiges of her headache, and her long-standing conviction that some mild nausea was a far more logical excuse to turn down sex than a headache if you really _had_ to resort to excuses, because orgasms had always cleared those right up for her... but within five minutes of shaking ‘hands’ and chastely petting and being petted by and otherwise exploring the things, Lorena’s mind headed straight for the gutter. She _like_ -liked what she saw.

"My father favored seaweed-like shapes, but I’ve always based mine on my mother’s," Garcia said.

"They’re gorgeous," Lorena said, and he ducked his head and blushed. "Thank you for telling me all this, and showing me these. It’s a lot to take in." Now it was her time to blush. "I mean – it might take a while for all this _information_ to sink in, that’s all."

"Of course. We have all the time in the world," he said.

(Five minutes later, she jumped his bones. Twenty minutes after that, she sucked her first tentacle into her mouth. Another two minutes after that, Garcia had spilled and gone limp, looking at her like she was a revelation, and went positively cross-eyed as she guided her first tentacle into her pussy. Two months later he’d found and bought a property over a portal in California, and they hadn’t stopped stuffing her full of tentacles since.)


	2. Laundry Day

Sometimes, Lorena looked at how much of her and Garcia’s lives had ended up arranged around tentacle sex since that first time in Croatia, and she had to laugh.

Some parts of the house were off-limits to the tentacles; her home office unless expressly invited, the downstairs windows with their plants and flowers in the sills, the space between the coffee table and the tv, the open china cabinet and the space in front of it. In other words, any place they might break something if they slipped or flailed or a sudden onslaught of tentacle made her jump, plus her workspace, which she liked to keep tidy and clean and just as she needed it to be, thanks. Everywhere else, though, was arranged to be safe for wild, sudden fucking. Garcia could safely lay her out on the coffee and dining tables, bend her over the couches and chairs any which way, press her up against every wall, tie her to any vertical surface. Sometimes he even suspended her from the ceiling, but given the difficulty of getting stains off or fixing damage done to it, he saved that for the attic and other storage spaces. He’d never let her hurt herself in a fall or on the hard corner of a piece of furniture before, but even so most things in their house had rounded edges.

Lorena had long since gathered that she had a higher libido than average, but it was the versatility and above-human strength of Garcia’s tentacles that made the difference between a house in which a lot of sex happened, and _their_ home.

A sizeable portion of Lorena’s wardrobe was based on easy tentacle access, too. Nothing got to her more than the feeling of two tentacles sliding up her back, around to her front, and curling around her breasts. Or creeping up the sensitive inside of her thighs, an omen of what was to come. So she wore few bras but a lot of flowy blouses and dresses, loose sweaters, skirts, baggy slacks and bermudas, colorful flowery men’s beach shorts, stretchy sports and leisurewear... Also pyjamas. She owned many more sets of pyjamas than she needed to sleep in, because when Garcia was gone she tended to go for days at a time only changing out of the pair she wore to bed to put on one of the more presentable sets she reserved for the day.

Her friends thought getting hitched had turned Lorena into a wallflower and a homebody, and Garcia was probably to blame. Her fashion sense had hardly undergone a massive, outlandish change when she started incorporating tentacle-friendliness into her wardrobe, but it was enough to permanently baffle them. No amount of protesting seemed to get it out of their heads that she’d neither secretly hated her body all along and had retreated into hiding it behind baggy camouflage once she’d landed herself a man, nor was Garcia a jealous, repressive prude who pressured her into dressing more conservatively. God, if only they knew. Her friends didn’t think much of Garcia’s frequent absences either, but at least she had more substantial comebacks than just a loud _‘for the millionth time, no’_ and a silent _‘the sex, though, hot damn’_ to that. Of course, even those comebacks would probably be more effective if she didn’t reschedule all the client appointments and friend dates she could and retreated into temporary hermitude whenever he left, but you win some you lose some.

For as long as Lorena had known Garcia, a war had waged on the other side of reality. It wasn’t like early on she, too, hadn’t questioned why he felt the need to go over there and fight as often as he did. For some years, his only answer was ‘because there are people in need there the same as there are here’. Which was the best possible answer when it came to going to war, she supposed, even though she thought most people would consider their civic duty of getting shot at and blown up fulfilled after Croatia, Bosnia, Chechnya, Nepal, Kosovo, and Chechnya again. He had a shrapnel scar that bisected his belly from ribs to groin and more old flesh wounds and bullet holes than Lorena liked to think about. He dutifully reported it to her whenever he got hurt on the other side, but it was probably a good thing she couldn’t see the scars of that for herself as well.

She’d expressed her surprise over the sad similarities between both worlds once, and he’d ruefully told her, "Just because some people operate in a higher number of dimensions doesn’t make them smarter or wiser. Just dumb in more directions."

Then the time travel rumors started, and his cousin Stiv lost a high-ranking captive neither of them recognized as a fellow interdimensional being but slipped through a portal to the other side anyway. The community of People Like Garcia was so very, very small, everybody kept track of everybody else. Meeting a stranger of the same kind was unheard of, and one so high up in the enemy’s ranks? Not good.

After that, Lorena couldn’t have pried Garcia out of that conflict if she tried. But she didn’t want to anymore. She needed the mystery solved as badly as he did. Something told her that as much as she hated seeing him go every time, they’d regret it more if he turned his back now.

Hours for her tended to be days for him when he was gone. Aging worked very, very differently over there. His over-here body didn’t show the passage of time from over there at all; his hair and nails never grew, he could spend his entire trip on starvation rations and come back _feeling_ weak and famished but exactly the same weight as when he left, and though the one-and-a-half to two months a year he was gone translated to at least one extra year for every Earth year, he still didn’t look a day over his Earth age. _Mental_ age was a whole other self-contradictory can of worms besides, for reasons even his people didn’t understand yet.

The time dilation varied either way, which frustrated Garcia and Lorena both. But unless he had a few tentacles poking through a portal and around the corner to her reality, things were always going faster on that side of the dimensional mirror. _Something_ about sticking parts of himself through the portal meant he temporarily moved at the speed of both worlds at the same time, like some kind of living bridge. Another one of those ‘no clue, but that guy in Paris’s second cousin’s daughter’s wife is a scientist, so maybe she’ll figure it out someday’ things.

But either way, it meant it was a good thing Lorena didn’t exactly mind his absences being virtual sex marathons on her end, where he reached out maybe once every one or two weeks and it translated to her getting stuffed full of tentacles four to ten times a day. He definitely shouldn’t stay gone for more than a two of her weeks at a time, or leave again too soon after returning. But so far, it had always worked out.

One time, he interrupted her while she was hanging up laundry in the sunny backyard, and made her come four times. The sheet he’d spread her out on was dry (and ready to be washed again) by the time they were done. He said his goodbyes and left her in a happy, sweaty heap, rolled up naked in that sheet.

Almost immediately, he came back.

 _Hey,_ he said, stroking her cheek, down her throat, between her breasts.

"Hey," Lorena croaked from her sheet burrito.

He did a double take, withdrawing, and the tentacle looked her up and down. (He was very good at anthropomorphizing his inhuman appendages.) _This is exactly as I left you._

Lorena laughed. "Yeah, well, it’s been maybe ninety seconds."

The tentacle curled up on itself as if covering its face in embarrassment. _Oh god, I’m sorry. It’s been three days, I stumbled on a small portal and figured I’d pop in. I’ll come back some other time and leave you to –_

"No, are you kidding? Let’s go again." She started untangling herself from the sheet.

 _We don’t_ have _to. We can always do something else._ The tentacle made restless wriggling motions, like he was shuffling his feet. _I’m definitely not complaining about the sex, don’t get me wrong, but I don’t want it if it’s a burden to you. If it’s asking too much, I’ll –_

"Let you know, I promise," she said. "But you’re not right now. Worrywart."

 _I do have some idea of the limits of your body, too,_ he said dryly.

Upside-down on her sheet in the grass, Lorena waggled her fingers at him. "Better when you get over here and touch me."

Obviously she could tap out whenever she wanted once they got started, and if she asked him to knock it off for a while or to restrict his activities to only certain times of day, that’s what he did. But otherwise, any time he was gone for work was a time she could expect to be grabbed and ravished without warning.

When she asked for something, he gave it to her. But most of the time she let go of her desire to drive the car and let him surprise her. He knew everything she liked, all the places and angles that felt best. And as long as she stayed on the premises, he had a rudimentary sense of her and her surroundings that intensified to mind reading and telepathy when they touched. He only rarely failed to give her what she wanted and needed.

He wrapped his tentacle around her hand now, and said, _Ah._

"Get me a glass of lemonade from the kitchen and I’m all yours again," Lorena teased.

Mind reading and telepathy. And through those, the ability to piggyback off of Lorena’s pleasure in these encounters. Garcia’s tentacles could be made deliciously sensitive, but they weren’t actually sexual organs. His primary source of pleasure and satisfactions when he used his tentacles on her was _her_ pleasure.

A pretty good deal for both of them. How many men had the ability to experience five orgasms in under twenty minutes? How many women were so shamelessly and enthusiastically pampered in bed? And how many couples could convey the full depth of their love with nothing but a touch – let alone those five-orgasm bedroom sessions?

Garcia’s tentacles, when he made them ‘walk’, always moved with a bit of a bounce, like a Disney animal. It was the most adorable thing, and Lorena could just picture him as a little boy, watching Winnie the Pooh and The Rescuers, Robin Hood and The Aristocats and Jungle Book, over and over and _over_ again like young children were wont to do, and imprinting on their sense of how made-up things moved.

A tentacle nudged the back door open and carried a glass of lemonade through. The tip held the glass in a perfectly stable grip, the body bobbed, and the base moved through the patio tiles and the lawn like it was water. Lorena sat up, resting her cheek in her hand and her elbow on her knee, and just about burst with how much she loved this strange, trusty man-and-a-half of hers.

 _Here you go,_ he said, and Lorena thanked him and accepted her drink.

The tentacle curled into her hair affectionately. Which was sweet, it really was, but...

While drinking, Lorena crooked a finger at it and pointed at her chest.

 _You’re sure you don’t want a break first, huh?_ he said, laughing. A second tentacle faithfully rose from the grass to latch onto her nipple.

"Yes honey, I’m sure honey." She finished her lemonade, gently tossed the glass into a roll toward the house, and grimaced. "Though I really should finish hanging this laundry before it all dries up as one giant mass of wrinkles..."

 _Oh! Of course, of course._ He drifted over to the laundry basket. _I’ll help._

"You’re on your break!"

 _And the sooner you finish, the sooner I can get to spending it on you. Besides, I didn’t say that was_ all _I was gonna do..._

Half a dozen burgundy tentacles sprouted from the ground, like the world’s strangest mushrooms. One of them squeezed her bare ass as she stood. She swatted at it playfully and made her way back to her neglected laundry basket. It followed, slipping between her legs to feel her as she bent down for a shirt. She gasped.

Garcia swore. _You’re still wet from last time. Do you know how crazy that is from where I’m standing? How hot?_

"Maybe I’m just kidding and I’ve actually been wet for you for three days straight," she said huskily.

Still pressed to her wetness, he shuddered. One flick to her clit, and he withdrew to let her hang her clothes. Mostly. Unsurprisingly, he copped a feel or teased a caress every time she came back for a new piece of half-dried clothing.

It was a lovely day in their little sanctuary near the beach. Sun overhead, a light breeze, grassy dunes sheltering the house and surrounding property from the outside world; perfect for walking around outside naked. Nudity was not a neutral state for Lorena – none of her friends’ drama about her wardrobe would be necessary if she felt comfortable going around her own house in her birthday suit all day every day – but it sure made for excellent foreplay.

"Now who’s eager."

 _I don’t know what you’re talking about,_ you _asked for it,_ he said in his most innocent voice, and tickled her spine.

But between Lorena and the tentacle squad, they made quick work of the laundry. Before she knew it, he tossed the clothes she’d been wearing before he surprised her the last time over the end of the clothesline, and turned all his attention on her body.

 _Now, whatever shall I do with you,_ he mused, encircling her waist with one tentacle and draping another over her shoulder. _This, obviously –_

Without warning, he plunged into her still-wet and pliant pussy. She stumbled, gasping for breath. The tentacles held her up, two more crisscrossing her back and chest like a haphazard embrace. She clutched at them as Garcia withdrew and pushed back up into her, stretching and filling her to the exquisite brink of comfort, forcing her up onto her toes.

_– but what else?_

Moaning, Lorena closed her eyes and bit her lips. She hung in the makeshift harness of his tentacles and canted her hips as he lazily pumped in and out of her and rubbed her clit.

_Any ideas?_

"More," she said. "You gave me plenty of just this last round. Fill me up with more."

 _I can do that,_ Garcia breathed. _Open up._

A new tentacle pushed against her lips, and she opened up obediently to let it slide into her mouth. Flatter than the one filling her pussy, at first it danced around her tongue in a near-perfect imitation of one of Garcia’s french kisses. Then it curled all the way around it and sucked, and any similarity to his mouth disappeared. Before long it started to swell, rounding out until it was just like having his cock in her mouth. Now it was Lorena’s turn to swirl her tongue around him, and Garcia’s to groan appreciatively.

He thrust into her mouth slowly and carefully, and between her legs nice and hard. A smaller tentacle sporadically rubbed her clit for variety. After how methodically he’d wrung orgasm after orgasm out of her on his last visit a whopping fifteen minutes or so earlier, this alone would have been enough to get her off again. But she wanted more. She pushed that thought at him, and he pushed a feeling of _soon, soon_ back at her until she was loose and relaxed enough for his liking.

Then the tentacles finally lifted one of her legs up, and a new, self-lubricating appendage circled her anus. Lorena dug her heel into the grass and leaned back into his grip, looking for a position that made her feel less like a flamingo awkwardly wrestling a squid.

Garcia sent her encouraging vibes and assured her: _I won’t let you fall._

Not _entirely_ her point, but she’d take it.

The narrow tip of the new tentacle probed and massaged her hole, testing her resistance. Finding it lessening as Lorena breathed deeply and made a conscious effort to unclench, he pushed through the puckered muscle. She made an appreciative noise around her living gag. The tentacles in her mouth and pussy slowed down as the other languidly opened her up further. Slow, shallow thrusts, slicked for her convenience.

Lorena was so focused on the feeling of being spread apart one thrust at a time that the pressure that eventually passed over her clit caught her completely by surprise, and she startled as if someone had snuck up behind her and slapped her shoulder. Her heel slipped, and she lost her footing, and suddenly all the tentacles holding her up snapped out of existence and she landed in a flailing heap in the grass.

"Oof!"

Garcia was back almost immediately. Translucent, but he was there, and swearing. _Sorry, sorry!_

"If you hadn’t poofed, that could’ve been a really unpleasant fall," she mumbled, hand drifting to her rear.

_I know. Three cheers for that moment of panic, I guess?_

"Yeah. Hey, it’s okay." She reached out and rubbed the curve of the tentacle’s contritely bent ‘back’. "But can we do this without you suspending me in mid-air for now?"

 _Yes, let’s,_ he agreed. _How did you have in mind?_

She looked around for the sheet they’d fucked on earlier, crawled over to it, and wriggled her behind. "Just like this."

That cheered him up. _Yes, ma’am._ The tentacles solidified and converged on her, a pack of chickens with something juicy to peck. He’d just fed the first tentacle back into her mouth when he paused. _Is this mind link on the fritz or am I suddenly a chicken?_

"Iw id wawgs lige a dug," she gabbled innocently.

 _Bawk bawk bawk?_ he said, and the taste of him on her tongue changed from vagina to his favorite recipe of spicy chicken breast.

She laughed until she almost choked on him, and then laughed some more. An involuntary moan cut her off as one of the tentacles pressed into her pussy. The way her body instinctively clenched around it as she laughed turned her amusement to fierce arousal pretty quickly.

 _I’m always willing to indulge your weird roleplaying scenarios, but unfortunately I can’t spend all day on this visit,_ he said. He thrust deeper, and Lorena thought back that she did not mind at all.

The tentacle pushed as far into her pussy as it could. If it could’ve bottom out, it would have. She felt its circumference shrink while it was still inside her, and, now good and wet, it pulled out and pressed back into her other hole. There, it started filling out again. A new tentacle took the place of the last in her pussy, the one in her mouth reminded her it was still there by dragging across her tongue, and _yes_ , now he finally filled her the way she’d hoped for.

Gradually, the tentacles between her legs formed a rhythm, one pushing into her while the other pulled out, the one retreating while the other thrust back in, and on and on. Two other tentacles moved her knees further apart and anchored them to the sheet for stability. More curled around her shoulders and pulled her back into the cock-tacles on every thrust. And once he, they, had gotten the hang of that interplay, he curled one more tentacle into her hair and added the one in her mouth to the mix.

Garcia spitroasted her like a well-oiled machine. He used her so thoroughly, she took from him so greedily, it felt like this was all either of their bodies had ever been made for, all they would ever need. Lorena’s every orifice was stuffed with him, and it made her body sing with pleasure. She was so full, there wasn’t an inch of her that wasn’t being stimulated. Inside, at least. Outside...

Reading her mind, a pair of tentacles materialized to envelop her breasts, and a third to attend to her clit. But he used the latter sparingly. Instead of relying on it to guide her to orgasm right away, he made sure to fuck her just right, rubbing all the most sensitive spots inside her. He may not have all day, but apparently he had time to tease her. To caress and pound her in turn, building up a pleasure that was only half _pleasure_ and half tension and anticipation. To force her jaw open as far as it would go, and penetrate her pussy deeper than any other position allowed, and rub the tips of his tentacles together through the thin barrier of her flesh as they passed each other.

The torment started out sweet, but it didn’t take him much time or effort to turn her desperate for release.

 _Garcia,_ she thought, her eyes closed and her voice no more than a tremor around the tentacle fucking her throat. _Garcia!_

 _Just a little more,_ he answered, even his mental voice breathless. _You wanted more, you can take a little more._

She could, but only a little. He’d been fucking her with only minimal breaks for so long that day, she was at her limit and tipping over into overstimulated within minutes. She keened, her thoughts a garbled mess of _if you don’t get my clit now I’ll do it myself_. And instead of touching her clit, he fucked her harder, fucked her faster, and said, _Then do it._

It was so unlike them it made Lorena falter. He never left the grand finale to her when he fucked her like this. She never rubbed herself to orgasm when he was inside her, enveloping her, restraining her. When she passed the reins to him and his tentacles, she wanted it to be for the entire ride, and he wanted to finish what he started.

 _You’re right,_ he thought pensively, as if he too was only really recognizing the pattern now. _Guess we’re making an exception this time. Do it. Do it now._

She obeyed. He hadn’t tied down her hands. She slipped her forefinger between her labia, found her clit, and didn’t let up on it until she was coming, clenching around him, closing her lips around him to muffle her scream, shaking and held upright only by the tentacles on her shoulders. All three tentacles slowed to a stop as she rubbed herself up to the summit and down again, her ass and pussy milking them for every last shock and aftershock of pleasure. Only when her movements had stuttered to a halt and her trembling was no longer accompanied by a needy grip, did he remove the tentacles. One by one; mouth, ass, then pussy, making an obscenely wet sound.

Lorena set her hand back down heavily and leaned on it, her body suddenly seeming to weigh a ton. Her arms and legs shook. Garcia let go of her with all his tentacles, almost experimentally, and she promptly let herself keel over onto her side. He laughed, and so did she.

"Is your time up yet?" she asked.

_Almost. Not quite._

"Wanna cuddle until then?"

_Definitely._

He wrapped around her in a dozen warm, heavy loops. Lorena petted one draped high across her shoulder and sighed happily.

"That was great."

_Yeah? Not too much?_

"Nope. Just perfect."

_Good, good._

"But if the next time you have a chance to stop by I’m still out here, on this sheet, I’m afraid I’m gonna have to disappoint you."

 _You could never disappoint me,_ he said, very earnestly, and nuzzled her cheek. _I love you. I don’t need the sex to remember that._

She nuzzled back. "I love you too, and you know that’s not what I meant."

_Being away from you makes me sentimental and overly literal. Can’t help it._

"Ah, that explains a lot."

 _Hey!_ he laughed. Then, thoughtfully, he said, _Hey..._ One of the tentacles darted out of her line of sight and came back holding up a clothes pin. He snapped it at her tits. _Wanna try it? Might be fun for next time._

She considered it for a moment and shrugged. "Sure, why not."

The tentacle drifted down, carefully clamped the clothes pin around her left nipple, and withdrew. Lorena winced but said nothing – yet. But the longer it stayed on, the worse it burned, until she tore it off and tossed it aside, and clutched her boob protectively.

"Ow ow ow, no, nope, not gonna do that. Gentle pinches only."

 _Awww, honey, I’m sorry. C’mere,_ he crooned apologetically, and she let him massage her sore nipple with a cool, soothing tentacle. _I didn’t realize it would really hurt._

"Yeah, me neither. But now we know." She affected an exaggerated pout. "I don’t like pain. So much for my afterglow."

_I know, I know. I’m not exactly at my best today, am I?_

"Oh, I’m just kidding. Trial and error, Garcia. That’s how all good things are made. And don’t worry, I’ve forgiven you for bigger blunders because you still made sure I came."

_Dare I ask?_

"Oh, is that your commanding officer I hear, telling you to move your ass?"

 _I_ am _the commanding officer. Any yelling you hear will be coming from my second-in-command._

"Well, I can’t have Stiv getting mad at you because I was hogging your time. Tell him I said hi."

 _I will. See you soon._ He laughed. _Not_ too _soon, but soon!_

‘Good,’ Lorena wanted to say, and ‘awww, no, I liked having you back so quickly.’ This interdimensional stuff was complicated, and probably always would be. But they’d make it work. They always had so far. So instead she blew Garcia a kiss and watched him fade into that other world, and rolled herself into her sheet until her limbs would cooperate again.


	3. New Baby

Then they had a baby, and their happy sex hours were reduced by half. The amount of time Garcia could spend on contacting the home front didn’t double just because he had two girls to catch up with now, after all. But Lorena didn’t mind. Every minute Garcia spent taking care of Iris from the shadow realm was another minute for her to catch up on all the sleep she was missing out on, taking care of a baby all by herself. Sometimes she’d wake up in those first months of Iris’s life to find a clutch of warm tentacles simply holding her as she slept, snuggled up to her like so many cats.

And of course, some of _those_ times she croaked, "Mmmm, coffee and wake-up sex, my favorite breakfast," and she knew one tentacle would pop into the kitchen to brew her a fresh cup of joe while the others affectionately petted her cheek, and brushed her rumpled hair from her face, and raised her from the bed just enough to let them ruck her nightgown up under the covers. His touches were soft and dreamlike, not so much helping her wake up further as prolonging the wet dream she’d half-surfaced from. Slow, light passes over her clit; gently cupping and stroking the breast not squished between her arm and the mattress; lifting one leg to give themselves access to her pussy. A slick, smokey tentacle circled her entrance, testing the give of her and slipping inside with ease once he figured out how thick he could be without straining her.

Murmuring appreciation and encouragement, Lorena turned her face into her pillow. Garcia stroked and pumped and kneaded her, propping her limp body up in all right places to let her stay as boneless as possible. It felt so good, and she was so warm and comfortable and drowsy. Her orgasm was small but perfect. Lorena sighed in satisfaction and felt herself slip from the pliant, pleasurable grip of her husband’s tentacles right back into the sweet embrace of sleep.

Garcia laughed. _But I made you coffee._

The last thing she remembered was garbling back a _thanks, honey_.


	4. Laundry Day Redux

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ‘Tata’ means ‘father/dad’ in Croatian.

They’d never gotten pets. Generations of experience had taught Garcia’s family that most domesticated animals were freaked out by the portal as it was, and being around members of his kind on top of it spooked them exponentially worse. It would’ve been fine anywhere that didn’t feature a hole in the membrane of reality – animals liked him just fine once he left the house, and while Lorena was neutral on them, Garcia did love animals – but if they wanted to keep the property with all its advantages, such was the price they had to pay.

So until Iris came along, it had only ever been the two of them in the house. For years, they’d done whatever they pleased whenever they pleased wherever they pleased, without a single concern for how it might look or sound to others. What others? It wasn’t like they had real neighbors either. But babies turned into toddlers, which turned Lorena and Garcia’s sex life into a constant game of ‘how do we keep our tirelessly nosy daughter from finding out what we’re doing?’.

The laundry room was always a safe bet. Iris knew she shouldn’t play in there, and they mostly kept it locked these days anyway, since it was where they stored all the cleaning supplies and other household chemicals, the toolbox and associated detritus, gardening supplies, sewing kit, and so on. Iris could get in while one of them was busying themselves in there, but they kept the key on a nail over the doorpost otherwise.

Their ringtone for a booty call had changed, too. They used the cries of seagulls now; a melody distinctive enough for Lorena to pick out, but not so unusual as to alert Iris. Especially since they’d trained _her_ to be on the alert for her own ‘tata-tone’, which sounded more like the jingle of an ice cream truck.

Lorena pecked her daughter on the cheek and got up off the couch as the gulls squawked their mating cries. "Mama’s going to do some more laundry, okay? Holler if you need anything."

"Okay," Iris said. She didn’t even watch her mother leave, blissfully engrossed in her cartoons.

Lorena took the key from the hook, unlocked the door, locked it again behind her, and flipped on the light in the warm, noisy laundry room. A familiar wine-red tentacle rose from the floor and took her hand.

"Hello to you too, handsome," she said, raising it to her mouth for a kiss. "Everything okay over there?"

 _This mission is actually kind of fun, if you’ll believe it,_ he said. He led her across the room like a gentleman on a dance floor, the skirt of her dress flaring out in panels of sea and sand and sunset. A second tentacle rose up to cup her cheek, and another wrapped around her waist and splayed across her back. It wasn’t quite like wrapping her arms around his chest and being held in his arms in return, but it felt good to be held at all. _Anything happen on your end while I was gone?_

"Nope. Just another ordinary morning."

He’d woken her at the crack of dawn, before even Iris had stirred, and made her come twice before she could leave the bed and a third time against the shower wall. So far, it had been the highlight of the day.

A new tentacle crept over her slipper, around her ankle, and up the inside of her thigh. She widened her stance to give it room. It nuzzled her through her panties in welcome, and then started tugging those panties down.

"No, wait, leave them on."

Garcia made an inquisitive noise, followed by a pleased, knowing _ah_ when she told him suggestively: "I’m doing laundry."

Instead, he lifted her up on the rumbling washing machine.

It was an older appliance, noisy and not as energy-efficient as a new one would have been, but so far they hadn’t replaced it yet and just called a mechanic on the rare occasions it acted up. Because the vibrations were something else.

Lorena settled with one leg thrown over the front and one over the side. The tentacles helped find a good angle for her to press to the vibrating surface, taking hold of her ankles and knees, her shoulders and wrists. They raised her arms above her head, forearms bound together, and spread her thighs.

 _Go on,_ he urged. _I’ll hold you up._

The vibrations rumbled through her body no matter how she sat. When she leaned back, her ass and the bottoms of her thighs and the backs of her labia pressed flush to the source; when she arched her spine and tilted her hips forward, her ticklish inner thighs and mound and clitoris. Lorena rocked back and forth, seeking both. First clinging tightly to the washing machine with her legs for balance, but after a few experimental tugs at Garcia’s tentacles, she rested her weight in his ‘hands’.

She rode the washing machine like that for what felt like a quarter of an hour. It was a good thing, she thought, that Garcia’s enjoyment of this came from piggybacking off of her pleasure first and his own actions second, because it couldn’t have been his most interesting afternoon, just holding her up as she rested her face against her raised forearms and rolled her hips, building her arousal up slowly and unsteadily without him. And eventually he _did_ seem to get a little bored.

"Hello, boys," she said, when two new tentacles materialized in front of her. They went straight for her breasts, like they had a homing beacon. To her surprise and confusion, though, they wrapped around her over her clothes instead of under. "Garcia, don’t be silly, get them in there."

 _I thought you wanted to keep your clothes on this time,_ he said.

"I want to minimize the mess I make," she corrected, and hummed, pleased, when the tentacles slipped into the neckline. An idea came to her, and it only took a moment of her squeezing her eyes shut and projecting the mental image to Garcia for him to pick it up. The ‘roots’ of the tentacles passed through her shoulders like smoke and materialized on the other side. Now they were a warm weight draped across her back and fondling her from behind, almost like it was him pressed up against her in the flesh. She hummed again, and pushed her chest into his grip on her next rock forward.

 _You like that better?_ he asked cheekily, and squeezed.

"You know I do." She grinned. "And we’re a couple of years past the point of making a mess with my _breasts_ , so."

A guilty laugh reverberated through her mind. _I still can’t believe I did that. So sorry._

"Uh-huh." Lorena didn’t halt the undulation of her hips for a moment. It slowed down her teasing a bit, but she rocked into his ministrations and into the vibrations of the washing machine without pause. "So sorry you kept it up for almost five minutes and wouldn’t stop sneaking ‘just one more’ taste."

 _I_ also _still can’t deny it was weirdly hot._

"Uh-huh. Like the flour thing?" she asked breathlessly. She ground harder against the washing machine, chasing the increasingly intense sensation necessary to keep climbing the slopes of her pleasure.

He made a mock-wounded noise. _This is so unfair. I rack up a handful of weird kink moments in my entire life and never hear the end of it, but you want to get stuffed full of extradimensional tentacles fifteen times a day for weeks on end and it’s just another day ending in -y._

"Sorry you’re such a weirdo, honey." Even as she laughed, the rhythm of her hips stuttered and deteriorated as she tried and failed to find the vibrations she needed. " _Ah._ Let go of my legs, I need them."

He freed her knees and ankles, the tentacles wriggling up her body under her dress to join their brethren in manhandling her tits. It left her free to scoot closer to the edge of the machine, and to close and spread her thighs however she wanted. The only thing holding her and her grabby friends up and in place now were the two tentacles around her arms. Her hands, closed into fists this whole time, opened and groped for them. Garcia obligingly placed them in her grasp and let her squeeze without complaint, firming beneath her touch.

Whimpering, she frotted ever more desperately against the rumbling washing machine. So close, she was _so close_. Almost enough. Almost there. Just a little harder, that was all it would take. But her weight alone was not enough, and without her hands she had no leverage, her slippered feet scrabbling uselessly against the smooth white metal and glass.

"Garcia," she keened. "Honey, please."

He knew what she needed. A warm, heavy tentacle dotted with suckers draped low around her hips, latching on through her dress. One end slapped itself against each side of the washing machine, and then it _pushed_. Or maybe pulled. Whatever. Suddenly, when Lorena ground down against that glorious rumble, she could exert the force she needed.

Together they rutted her against her overgrown vibrator until the tension burst and her clit pressed down just right, and she froze in that exact position, her back arched like a bow, coming and shaking and biting back against how hard she wanted to cry out with the force of it.

Head drooping, mouth open and panting, she sagged into Garcia’s grip. She hung there, suspended bonelessly from the tangled tentacles as she caught her breath. Until, feeling rather silly, she realized the washing machine wasn’t stopping just because she’d had her orgasm, and beyond her peak was now not a valley, but a second climb.

"Put me down," she told him. "I want you in me."

She didn’t have to ask him that twice. He lifted her by her wrists and hips and settled her on the tile floor – on her knees, but still with her hands pulled up into the air. He still knew what she needed. A tentacle pulled her panties aside and wasted no time plunging into her, going from thin and dextrous to as thick and filling as an erection in the blink of an eye.

"Clit," she groaned, but she needn’t have bothered: he was already on that too.

Wet and ready, she bounced on him hard and deep and thick. Her knees were spread, her mouth was open, and it took her barely a minute to come again. And, a silent, motionless breather later, again, her pussy so saturated with stimulation it was easier to give her clit a quick, vigorous rub and come again than to pull back from the brink of another orgasm. It wasn’t until two more orgasms later that she started wanting the thick tentacle out of her. And even when it retreated (so slick with her juices she could hear it leaving her even over the noise of the washing machine) and the tentacles around her arms gently placed her hands on the tile, Garcia read her mind and came back for one last assault on that magic bundle of nerves.

Lorena’s dropped her face in her arms and felt her legs writhe. It was too much and exactly enough, perfect and unbearable and –

The doorknob rattled.

"Mama!"

Lorena’s head shot up, hand slapping over her mouth, Garcia literally jolting out of existence between her legs, and she toppled over onto her side like a startled seal. Her heartbeat pounded in her ears, and Garcia gave voice to her own racing thoughts with a torrent of _oh god oh no tell me she didn’t hear that._

"Mama!" Iris called again.

With great effort, Lorena unstuck her throat. "Yes?"

"I wanna draw."

"Okay, sweetie." She scrambled for an upright position – difficult, with limbs that felt like sausages – and hoisted herself up on the dryer. "Go ahead and think of what you want to draw. I’ll be right there with the crayons and paper."

"Okay."

The washing machine was too loud to hear over, but Lorena thought Iris probably walked away after that. Right? Normally she’d go and sit at the table now, wouldn’t she?

Garcia made a sound halfway between laughing and sobbing. _Shiiiit._

Lorena fished one of her nightshirts from the hamper holding the next load of laundry to be washed, wiped away her excess slick with it, pulled her damp panties back into place, wiped the top of the washing machine too, and then the floor for good measure.

"That was the real, authentic parenting experience, right there," she whispered, and Garcia’s last remaining tentacle collapsed on her shoulder and shook with his laughter.


	5. Rittenhouse

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ‘Tata’ means ‘father/dad’ in Croatian.

There were things about Lorena’s husband she would never fully understand. Entire spatial dimensions of him her brain literally _couldn’t_ comprehend. And that was okay. It wasn’t like he was withholding information to mess with her, or hadn’t tried to help her see. When they decided to have Iris, he’d shown her things and taken her places and they’d tried and tried and tried until she passed out from the effort. Unlike the tiny miracle that was their daughter’s existence, Lorena witnessing her and Garcia’s full forms simply wasn’t meant to be. She could live with that, and did so happily.

The only concession Lorena asked from him because of it was that he would never, ever lie to her, about anything, no matter how small or inconsequential or how much it might hurt her to know the whole truth. She didn’t begrudge him the many things she could never know or understand, she really didn’t. But that didn’t mean they didn’t take a subconscious toll on her. So her limit when it came to the normal little white lies and omissions and considerations that greased the gears of society was much lower with him than with anyone else. Not knowing what that decades-long extradimensional war of his even looked like was hard enough: not being able to trust that he was telling her the truth about it to the best of his abilities, either, would’ve been intolerable. A thousand times worse than any actual worrying she did. For someone so used to secrecy it had been a drastic change, but Garcia understood, and readily accepted this responsibility to her peace of mind.

He had never, _ever_ given her reason to doubt his honesty.

So when, one day, his answer to her "Hey, you’re home early. Where did you get those clothes?" was a bone-crushing hug and a frantic "Time travel caught up to us. I figured out who’s behind it and they killed you for it. I brought you back, but they’re still after us and we need to go!", Lorena’s first instinct wasn’t _‘What?’_ , it was "Oh, _shit_."

She desperately grabbed his wrists. "Where’s Iris? Tell me they didn’t get her too!"

His relief at being believed almost exploded out of him, as if he had actually expected her not to. Bizarre.

(The first thing Lorena did once they’d hit the road was find out what could possibly have made him think she wouldn’t believe him about something like this. Which may have ended up biasing her against her soon-to-be roommates a bit. So sue her. Her husband left that morning feeling fine, but when he came back he was a nervous wreck, and everything he – and later the others – told her, suggested it was to a significant degree _their_ fault.)

"Safe, with my mother," he told her before they got that far, and dragged her upstairs to pack for a relocation.

Lorena did a double take, stumbling in her effort to keep up with him. "Your mother? Garcia, your mother’s dead!"

They hurried into their bedroom, and Garcia pushed on through to the adjacent storage closet to dig up their suitcases and go-bags, while Lorena pulled open the wardrobe.

"Pack for cold weather, I hear it’s freezing where we’re going," he said, before: "Not anymore she isn’t. And neither is my brother. You know, Gabriel? I’ve mentioned him a couple of times."

"The one who died of a bee sting before your mother came to Croatia?" she said, pulling down her entire pile of sweaters and a stack of undershirts.

"That’s the one." Garcia swung their suitcases onto the bed and threw them open. He shot her a strained smile. "I’m sure he’s nice. We should get to know him sometime."

Dumping her first armful in the nearest suitcase, she went back for pants and sorted through the lot for her warmest ones. Garcia joined her, rifling through his side of the closet. She studied his profile, the tense set of his shoulders, the unhappy lines around his mouth and eyes. "You don’t know him already?"

"Well, no, I have all the same memories you do up until three years ago. Or this morning, depending no how you look at it. That’s when the timelines start to shift and diverge. I never lived through his version of history."

Garcia tossed his turtlenecks at his suitcase, grabbed his winter pyjamas, and stilled his frenetic motions. Slowly, he brought the pyjamas to his face, closed his eyes, pressed his nose into the fabric, and inhaled.

"This..." His shoulders shook. "You always used this – this exact fabric softener."

"Oh, honey," Lorena breathed, reaching for him. Clothes fluttered down around them as he turned to take her in his arms. His grip was so tight it took her breath away, but she pushed up on the tips of her toes, pulled his head down until he buried his face in her neck, and rocked him as he sobbed. "Oh, Garcia, sweetie."

"I’m so sorry," he cried. "I’m so, so sorry."

Squeezing as hard as she could with one arm, she carded her other hand through his hair, dragging her fingers firmly across his scalp. _Shhh, shhh,_ she went. _Shhh. I’m here. It’s okay._

 _Nothing’s okay,_ he thought. _I messed up. It was all my fault, Lorena._

"I don’t know what you’re sorry for or why you think it’s your fault, but you’re going to tell me. First we pack these bags and get out of here, and then you’ll tell me everything. Okay?"

"She’s seven," he mumbled.

"What?"

His hands fisted in her shirt. "You were dead. Iris wasn’t. We were alone for so long... She’s seven years old now, Lorena. Turning eight this month. I took three years of her life from you."

Lorena opened and closed her mouth. Then opened it again. And closed it, jaw trembling. "D-did she miss me?"

"Every day. We both did."

She blinked away a baffled rush of tears. "Then what the hell are we waiting for? Get packing. _Iris_ first, debriefing later."

They stuffed everything they could into their suitcases, filled a separate duffel to bursting with things of Iris’s Garcia knew she missed or thought she might not have grown out of yet, tied their sneakers and walking shoes together, stripped all the pillows and duvets from the beds ("I’ve read horror stories about the nights that bunker, honey, better to get ahead of them."), and piled everything in a random black car Garcia had parked out front.

The drive they took had all the spy story clichés: circling around, doubling back, shaking off any car that took more than two turns with them. They only didn’t switch cars halfway through because their destination was surprisingly close. And what was waiting for them there blew all the intrigue out of the water. A huge, white metal sphere with bands of blinking blue lights circling it.

A young, tense-looking Middle Eastern woman opened the hatch for them and helped pile their luggage inside and tie it to a row of chairs. Garcia introduced her as Jiya Marri.

"My pilot."

"For about five more minutes, and then you’re all out of favors," she said tersely.

"She’s on loan from the other office," Garcia stage-whispered.

Lorena held out her hand for Jiya to shake. "Lorena Flynn. Nice to meet you."

"You too." Jiya managed a smile for her, but it was there and gone again in a flash. She winced and turned away. "Buckle up, we don’t have all day. My head is killing me."

As they did so, Lorena raised an eyebrow at Garcia.

"That _might_ be literal. But probably not. I’m sure it’s fine. Turns out that because of... who I am as a person, time-travel doesn’t have quite the same rules and restrictions for me that it does for everybody else. Excellent news in theory, except it takes years of training to operate a time machine, and nobody has been willing to teach me. So I had to wait for a qualified pilot with similar qualities to come along before I could put it to use."

Lorena’s eyes shot to Jiya. "You’re like him?"

"No," Jiya said, flipping switches and pushing buttons. "I just had an eight-dimensional brain bleed due to a miscalculated jump through space-time. Wouldn’t recommend it. So far I’m the only person who’s had one without dying or going insane. Brace yourself – we’re jumping in three, two, one –"

Their reception in the time-travelers’ bunker was chilly, to say the least. The people there were Jiya’s friends but didn’t seem to like or trust Garcia one bit, and they barely asked who Lorena was before devolving into a lot of yelling about a truce and whether ‘Flynn’ calling in his favor from Jiya the way he had was a violation of trust before their partnership could even formally start, or if voluntarily bringing them his time machine to use against Rittenhouse's new Team Lifeboat made up for it and, actually, _required_ a gesture of trust on _their_ part first to happen at all.

Feeling thoroughly shut out by the wall of noise and hostility, Lorena unpacked the time machine and put a hoodie on over her shirt (Garcia was right, it was cold down here) before sticking two fingers into her mouth and whistling as loudly as she could.

All heads turned to her.

"If you guys wouldn’t mind shelving this for later, I want my daughter," she said.

The group protested, but Garcia just nodded tightly and pushed his way through them, disappearing down a hallway and rounding a corner into the depths of the bunker.

" _Where_ do you think you’re going," the older woman, the government agent, fumed, and marched after him.

This bunker was built on top of another portal, Lorena realized in surprise. She’d grown so used to their own, she didn’t notice until she felt the tell-tale ripple that meant Garcia was slipping through the membranes of reality into a state of existence the rest of them could not reach or comprehend. One of the many knots in her stomach loosened. Thank god. The escape hatch of their home-portal had saved his and Iris’s lives when Rittenhouse came for them in their beds, he said. Lorena would sleep better knowing they could do the same here.

"Jesus H. Christ," the younger, not-British black guy muttered, shaking himself. "Guys, is it just me or did Flynn suddenly get even creepier? Like, he was always a scary, unhinged asshole, but it’s like he just waltzed in here in a billowing cloud of _eau de freak of nature_."

"Oh, good, it’s not just me thinking that," the white guy said darkly. He held up an arm covered in goose bumps.

"And if you could not call my husband ‘Flynn’ all the time around me, I’d appreciate it. Because that’s my name and our daughter’s name too, and it’s already driving me to distraction," Lorena snapped.

You could hear a pin drop. Nobody moved anything but their heads or eyes, and no matter how many looks exchanged among each other or flitted in her direction, those eyes remained tight with awkwardness.

"Riiiight," the other young woman said eventually. "Indoor voices. Time to learn them. We’re a team now, guys. Better get used to it. Flynn – Garcia – is good at what he does, he brings skills and knowledge to the table that the rest of us can only dream of, and he may have gone about it in a... misguided way, but he’s always _tried_ to be on our side, if you stop to think about it. We can’t afford to squander that."

She approached Lorena and held out her hand. "I’m Lucy Preston. History professor. It’s good to finally meet you. I’d be lying if I said we’ve had the chance to talk with your husband a lot in the past, but when we did you were always on his mind."

Lorena cocked her head. There was something familiar about Lucy she couldn’t place. A good kind of familiar, but why on earth would she be familiar at all?

"Thanks," she said a moment too late, and shook her hand awkwardly. "Lorena Flynn. Accountant." A beat. "And no-longer-dead wife and mother, I suppose."

Then reality rippled again, and her eyes shot to the end of the hallway. (In the corner of Lorena’s eye, Lucy acted like someone had walked across her grave.) A heartbeat, two, three, four, five, six, and then Garcia and the now even more agitated agent rounded the corner again, accompanied by two other female figures. An older woman who Lorena could tell, even in the blink of an eye and at such a distance, had Garcia’s green eyes. And –

"MAMA!"

Oh dear god, she’d gotten so big.

"Baby," Lorena croaked, tears springing to her eyes, and burst into a sprint to match her daughter’s.

It was a lot to take in. It was a miserable adjustment to have to make. And the company didn’t disprove her first impressions of them much, either. (Fine, her biases. See if she cared, though.)

Most of them tried, to be fair. The journal had made Lucy by far Garcia’s favorite ‘teammate’, and though Lorena thought she was way, way too deep into her denial and her desperate desire to cling to her old ideas of normalcy to make a very reliable partner, she had to admit Lucy was head and shoulders ahead of the rest. And then there was the issue of her inexplicable familiarity. Lorena asked Garcia about it, and he looked pained but handed her an envelope containing a handful of pages he’d torn out of the journal.

Lorena read them and felt her jaw drop. "She doesn’t know? That’s _possible?_ "

"Apparently," he said. He looked faintly nauseated by the idea. "Her mother in the timeline she grew up in... was a very different person than she is now. It’s broken her heart, and she doesn’t even know the half of it."

"Garcia." She gave him an incredulous look. "It doesn’t matter what Lucy was thinking when she wrote you this, if the woman she is now finds out you’ve been keeping this from her, she’s going to lose her fucking mind."

"So be it," he said grimly.

"You can’t just make these kinds of decisions for other people!"

"Wow, it’s been a day and you’re already starting to sound just like her. _I_ didn’t make this decision, _she_ did. I’m honoring her wishes, and I’m quite frankly beyond the point of caring what she thinks of that now that she no longer remembers making me swear to do so."

"She’s going to find out sooner or later. They want her back into the fold and they’ll use every weapon in their arsenal."

"Quite possibly. But it won’t be because I broke my promise."

Lorena agreed to keep the secret with him, but not happily.

Everybody acted like professionals for Lorena, Iris, and (for the duration of her stay) Maria’s sakes, if nothing else. But some of them really, really failed. Like Master Sergeant Wyatt Logan, who very earnestly sat Lorena down one evening, made her tea, and tried to subtly clue her in on what an inhuman horror her husband was and how him bringing her back from the dead didn’t mean she ought to feel like she owed him her life now or anything, with an air of telling a battered wife about the existence of women’s shelters.

Lorena threw her tea in his face.

And for good measure, the next time they were in the same room together, she convinced Iris to play tentacle pattycake with her where he could see it. (Which, actually, gave her an idea, so she did it again around Lucy later.)

"I hurt his pride pretty badly," a grinning Garcia explained later that night, over a cup of tea of Lorena’s own making. "They hired him to kill me, and you can see how well that worked out."

He was doing a little better now. For days, he’d explained and explained again and roped the others in to explain some more. And Lorena had had a million questions, sure, but not _that_ many, and most of the answers didn’t need to be repeated five times. That first night in the bunker, he’d made love to her like a man possessed. It hadn’t been very good, but she could live with a few duds if they helped bring him back to himself. It scared her, the wounds that had been struck to his soul in what, for her, had been a matter of hours. Scared her and broke her heart.

(He’d killed people, was the first version of his confession to her. A lot of people. Sometimes under circumstances that wouldn’t hold up as self-defense in a court of law. After he got hold of the time machine, _more_ than sometimes, on a mission no government he had served since he came of age would have sanctioned.

She’d bluntly asked how that was different from any of the other times he’d gone to war, and what he cared for the sanction of a government that had been corrupted by a malice like Rittenhouse’s from infancy.

Iris was how it was different, he’d confessed at long, long last. His tears had drenched the back of her shirt, and he’d been unable to look at her for hours after. Iris had seen him kill. Decades of painstaking compartmentalization to be able to do what he did to protect his home and his family, blown out of the water in the split-second it took him to look up and find her wide, fearful eyes staring back at him.

He’d failed their daughter again and again, he said, the danger getting closer to her the more they wore him down through months and months of running and hiding and fighting and never, ever trusting anyone. His very first mission in the Mothership had been to save his brother, and as much as he wished he could say his motives had been altruistic, the truth was he’d simply hoped that if there were anyone else of his blood left alive, they might be able to hide Iris for him.

 _From_ him.

He’d hoped for a valid reason not to have to look their little girl in the eye so much anymore, knowing what the only person in the world he loved left alive had seen him do.)

(Before, Lorena had never been a violent person, in thought or deed. After that night, she was. Bad dreams no longer meant misplacing vital pieces of paperwork and ruining her business, or having to look for Garcia on the other side of reality but being unable to even _see_ anything over there; they meant two gravestones erased from the timeline, leaving her with nothing to prove her family had ever existed at all, and laboriously beating and strangling amorphous men in cravats and old-timey wigs to death with her bare hands.)

"Oh, come on, it’s funny. He never even grazed me; Lucy is the only one who ever got a shot in. That takes a spectacular amount of bad luck, for a fighter of Wyatt’s caliber," Garcia insisted laughingly. Then he sobered, and leaned across the table to brush a curl of hair away from her face. "Hey. Where’s your mind at, huh?"

"I’m crawling out of my skin down here," she admitted. "Wyatt was just the straw that broke the camel’s back. I can’t stand any of this. The waiting, the not knowing. You being gone somewhere you can’t even _talk_ to me, when you jump. Never being able to escape the thought that everything about me could suddenly change, and afterwards I wouldn’t even know it had happened. And just – just not having anything I can _do_. I’m an accountant, for Christ’s sake!"

He wrapped an arm around her shoulders and pressed his nose into her hair, breathing deeply. They sat like that for a while, Lorena finishing her tea and Garcia trying to silently impart comfort. She wanted it to help, but it didn’t escape her notice that he didn’t suggest anything she might have to contribute to their terrible time war after all. Either he really couldn’t think of anything, or he didn’t _want_ to involve her any further.

Maybe he was thinking that the last time he asked for her input – a second opinion to confirm that the money stream between Mason Industries and Rittenhouse was fishy as all get-out – it ended in her death.

"Let me help you get out of your head," he murmured into her hair after a while.

"Oh, come on, you know as well as I do how the sound carries down here."

"Do you trust me?" he asked.

"Yes," she sighed, rolling her eyes. That never changed, and she was in no mood to pretend otherwise.

She took their empty cups over to the kitchen counter and, when he declined her offer of more, rinsed and dried them on autopilot. Garcia let her be for a bit, only following when she was done, had put the cups away, and run aground where she stood, useless and helpless and despondent. He took her by the shoulders and turned them around, her back to his chest.

"If you trust me, let me help you." He pointed. "Right there. On that table." He tightened his arms around her chest. Her body responded automatically, her heartbeat picking up and warmth blooming in her belly. Pushing back into him, she gripped his forearms and let him catch her weight. "Let me take you apart, and trust that I won’t let anyone hear or see you."

For a long while, she hesitated. He didn’t push her, nor did he take it back. He just held her tight, surrounding her with the comfort of his presence.

"You can do that?"

"Yes."

"You’re _sure?_ "

"Yes."

She swallowed thickly. "Okay then."

He rubbed her arms soothingly. "Okay. Take off your clothes."

A violent shiver wracked her body. "Garcia..."

"Trust me," he whispered, and pressed a kiss to her temple. "I’ll take care of you, honey. Always."

Heaving a trembling breath, she stepped away from him and lifted her sweater and undershirt over her head. She held them up. "Where do I...?"

"Just go ahead and drop them."

She dropped them. Her hands shook as she unclasped her bra, shrugged it off her shoulders, and let it fall to the floor. Her nipples tightened unpleasantly in the sudden, subterranean cold. Rubbing them with the flats of her hands, she tried to get them to relax, but it was no use. She gave up and untied the drawstrings of her sweats instead. Shoved them down and off. Stepped out of them. Hooked her thumbs into her panties.

Lorena didn’t look back at Garcia the entire time. She glanced down the hall toward the bunks now, though, her hands frozen against her hips. Her chest felt unbearably exposed already. This next step – it was impossible. Her entire body trembled. The cold caused goose bumps to erupt all over, despite the hot flush rising under her skin and the slick forming between her legs.

Tentacles encircled her wrists and gently tugged her fingers from her waistband. She jerked against his grip, testing the feeling, the urge, but he held her firmly in place. She settled into his hold. Not relaxing by a long shot, but maybe it would be the first step.

 _Shhh,_ Garcia told her. _It’s alright, honey, I’ve got you._

Two more tentacles touched her hips and finished the job for her – but agonizingly slowly.

"Garcia!" she hissed, and kicked her panties the rest of the way off.

Chuckling, he rubbed her arms and kissed her shoulder. "Sorry, sorry, just trying to lighten the mood. Now, get on the table."

She made a noise of disgust. "That’s gotta be freezing!"

He laughed some more, and she elbowed him in the ribs. "Okay, okay, I’m sorry." A lone tentacle shot out and dragged a blanket from the couch over the table. "Better?"

"Much."

After one last look down the hall, she turned to face him and sat on the table. He smiled encouragingly and caressed her cheek, his thumb tracing her cheekbone, and he kissed her. She managed a tremulous smile in return.

"Lie back," Garcia said.

Heart pounding, Lorena lay back.

"Spread your legs," Garcia said.

Lorena spread her legs.

"Arms above your head," Garcia said.

Lorena raised her arms above her head.

He wrapped his hands around her waist, found her trembling still, and rubbed warm circles into her skin.

"Still trust me?" he asked.

She nodded, and a tentacle wrapped around her head, covering her ears and eyes and cutting off all light and sound. From one moment to the next, all she could see was the organic static of the inside of her eyelids, and the only thing she could hear was the flow of her own breath and blood. She opened her mouth, but he pressed a finger to her lips.

 _People who can’t hear themselves tend to talk a lot more loudly than they realize,_ he said. _I promised I wouldn’t let anyone find you like this._

Taking a deep, shaky breath, she nodded.

A second tentacle snaked over her mouth. The soft, warm, not-quite-skin dragged across her lips, and she parted them without even having to think about it. _Do you want it like a muzzle or like a rope to bite down on?_

_Hurting you isn’t going to make me feel better._

_You wouldn’t hurt me._

_Give me something to bite on, then._

The tentacle pulled taut across her cheeks and curved into her mouth. It forced her jaws apart – not too wide for comfort, but enough to really feel it – and lodged itself between her teeth. Garcia lay his hand over her throat.

 _Now try to make some noise,_ he said.

She did. She felt her throat vibrate against his hand, but like the first tentacle, it muffled everything.

 _You’re magical,_ she thought at him.

He chuckled. _Seems like it sometimes, huh?_

Then his touch, both on her throat and against her hip, left her. He replaced it with a third tentacle around her throat, substituting for his magical hand, and four around her limbs. One for each wrist and ankle; tying the former down on the edge of the table, bent double with her hands by her head, and the latter to the legs of the table. A limb for every corner. They fixed her in place where she lay, spread-eagled in nothing but her socks in the middle of their ragtag team’s common space. The ones around her ankles spread her legs as far as they comfortably could, exposing her completely. She felt the lips of her pussy part without either of them having to touch them, slick and throbbing between her quaking thighs. A shiver wracked her body all over again.

 _I trust you,_ she chanted to herself, eyes squeezed tightly shut even under her tentacle blindfold and all her muscles tight and trembling. _I trust you, I trust you, I trust you, I trust you..._

 _Good,_ he said. _Because without me, anybody could come in and see you like this. All trussed up and splayed out, like a turkey waiting for her stuffing._

Despite herself, Lorena made a disagreeable noise.

 _Less belly than a turkey, though, that’s true,_ he said cheerfully, rubbing hers as if that was even remotely what she’d meant. She bucked up into his touch. He pushed her down and changed his telepathic tune. _Helpless to leave this spot. Helpless to cover yourself up. If somebody walked in you wouldn’t even_ know _it. Blind and deaf and mute to anything but yourself._

And him.

 _And me. But if I didn’t tell you, you’d have no way of knowing if this_ – his large, warm hand covered her breast – _really was me. If I stopped talking now and walked away to watch TV, any of the others could wander up to you and gawk. Maybe they’d admire what a beautiful body you have, and how amazing you look, at my mercy like this. Maybe they’d be disgusted with me and pity you. Maybe I’d have the volume turned up so high they’d think they could get away with doing_ this.

He squeezed her breast, _hard_ , and cupped her sex with his other hand at the same time, his fingers suddenly rubbing between her soaking folds. She jolted, gasping. Her body didn’t know whether to buck into his groping fingers or away from them. His touch gentling, he stroked her breast and kissed it better. His mental voice sounded like it might break.

 _But you don’t have to worry about any of that, because I’m not going anywhere and I’m not letting anything happen to you ever again. You know that, right?_ His hand coming to rest against the side of her neck was like a plea. _Right?_

_Yes. I’ve always known that. I always will._

(But of course, to him, all his promises had been gutted and turned to the worst kind of lies once already as Rittenhouse forced its way into their home, their sanctuary, and riddled her with bullets. Let her to drown in her own blood as she tried to shield Iris with her body and Garcia tried to fight his way through the mass of black-clad intruders in time, and they both failed in the end. She couldn’t remember it, hadn’t made it to that night at all before he snatched her from the timeline the second time around, but she could imagine the final, solitary head shot that had killed her with perfect clarity. The shot, and Iris’s terrible screams after, and Garcia’s _face_.)

He pressed a kiss to the base of her throat, and his lips trembled as hard as she did, and a lone drop of moisture found her skin. Then he straightened, telling her, _I’ve got you now, just trust me, everything will be okay,_ and there was no more talking, just touching.

His hands disappeared again. For a seemingly endless time, there was nothing. Just darkness, and the chill of the bunker, and the sound of her own breathing. When the tentacles finally came, they came out of nowhere. No seagulls or _Shoggoth on the Roof_ or even a gust of wind to warn her. Lorena was alone on her table one moment and at the mercy of a tentacle the next.

The first brushed a feather-light touch up the ticklish inside of her thigh. She’d been suspended in breathless anticipation for so long, the suddenness made her yelp and jolt off the table. Except the sound of her cry was stolen by his extradimensional trickery, and her body was tied down. The tentacles around her limbs had just enough give to let her startle thoroughly, but that was it.

The second touch (after a good, tension-building pause) was a quick tug on her nipple. Again her body responded, and again the world around her swallowed it down into the darkness. A flick of her ear. A poke to the sole of her foot. A lick into the hollow of her throat. A tug at her elbow. A _SONOFABITCH_ tickle right at the base of her spine that could only have come from a tentacle manifesting right through the _YOUMOTHERFUCKER_ table, which practically gave her a heart attack and had her start up another shriek with every breath she took for a good half minute, it was such a dirty trick.

 _I’m sorry,_ he said, his wince audible. _Too much?_

 _I HATE YOU – YOU’RE EVIL – YOU ABSOLUTE MONSTER._ She gulped in air through her nose like a drowning woman, chest heaving and knees quaking and her heartbeat taking its sweet time returning to anything approaching normal. Complex thought was getting harder. Already she was submerged up to her ears in blind, animal action and reaction. But now that she’d remembered he could do that, she’d see it coming, so she told him: _Don’t you dare stop until I tell you to stop!_

 _Okay,_ he said, and promptly ran a tentacle down the back of her neck.

Another writhing shriek, and they kept going.

She was floating through a void, blinded and silenced and defenseless, and something that didn’t play by the rules of the rest of the world was toying with her, doling out sweet little licks and mean little taps of pleasure at maddening random. Every time she threatened to become too used to what was going on, he found something to put her back on edge again. A longer pause, a sharp, jolting smack, one tentacle lingering for so long the next scared the bejezus out of her.... Mind-reading cheat.

It kept happening, over and over, and her body just kept falling for it, again and again. The tentacles wound her up worse and worse and worse, winning every time. He got her defenses up only to knock them down, giving her no time to recover, and the longer it went on the more intolerable his actions and the more disproportionate her responses became. She realized she was crying and had no idea when the tears started. It was too much. She needed it to stop, but not because _he_ stopped. She needed a breaking point, a catalyst that would take all of this tension and all of her day-to-day fear and misery, all of her futile fight or flight instinct, and turn it into something better.

The tentacles got another hit in to the underside of her knee, and another against the curve of her waist. Squirming and crying, she pulled futilely against her restraints. The next was the unmistakable feeling of Garcia’s hands on her thighs. And then – holy shit, it was like he poured a whole vat of tentacles over her. Warm, soft, wriggly appendages wrapped around every inch of her; stroking her arms and legs and back and belly, squeezing her neck and shoulders, her tits and her ass, her hips and thighs.

A bunch of them spread her ass cheeks. They tilted her hips and opened her up, and then a thin, slick tentacle pressed to her anus and slipped inside. More latched like octopus suckers onto her pussy lips and spread them wide, exposing her wet, winking hole completely.

 _Good god, if the others could see you now,_ Garcia thought, and that was it, that was her breaking point. Something snapped, and Lorena wailed and twisted as a huge, wracking sob tore through her. And Garcia, her Garcia, her wonderful husband, her child’s indomitable father, her magical mind-reading soulmate, found her clit with perfect timing and furiously rubbed her to an earth-shattering orgasm. Her whole body heaved with it, rippling like a flag in a storm.

Her release crested and fell, and it was a relief the likes of which Lorena hadn’t experienced in years. But after everything it had taken to get her to this point, it wasn’t enough. One orgasm barely took the edge off. She begged him without words, beyond the capacity of forming sentences, for more. Her body was in need and demanded to be sated. Her body was empty and demanded to be filled. She wanted to feel his human skin, feel the weight and heat of him on top of her, inside of her.

And he was phenomenal, she’d married this one and no-one else for a reason, so he gave her everything she asked for and more. _Anything, Lorena, anything at all._ He fed his cock into her pussy, pushing her walls apart to accommodate him and filling her to the brim. The tentacle in her ass grew and swelled. When one thrust inside, the other retreated, setting a rhythm of constant fulfillment. He replaced the tentacle on her clit with his thumb, curled his other hand under and around her shoulder, rested his weight on her, and fucked her good and hard. He fucked her through a swift second orgasm that turned into a third, and she felt a thin tentacle wrap around the base of his shaft to hold back his own release as he kept fucking her through that third, which turned into what felt like one, endlessly protracted, heightened state of orgasm-to-semi-orgasm-to-orgasm-to...

 _More,_ she thought. Darkness couldn’t exactly creep into her vision, but she was getting lightheaded and she knew where that would be leading. _One more. More, Garcia._

The tentacle over her mouth unwrapped itself from her face and instead slipped beneath her shoulders, lifting them. The one around her eyes and ears tilted her head back. Together they exposed her throat, and a new one slipped between her panting lips and into her mouth. It pressed down on her tongue, hot and wet and throbbing, and started pumping in and out of her mouth. With all the attention she could spare, she hollowed her cheeks and sucked as he thrust as deep as he dared.

 _Easy, easy,_ Garcia said, to himself or to her she wasn’t sure. But she didn’t want easy. She lengthened her neck and widened her jaw, taking him in deeper, and moaned for more.

 _I can take it, come on, I want it._ She wanted to feel and think nothing else but this, but him, but them tangled up in each other until there was no telling where one ended and the other began.

He groaned, gutted, said _okay, okay_ , and she felt something change about the tentacle in her mouth. And then he thrust further, deeper, and filled her all the way to the back of her throat like it was nothing. She could feel him, taking up all her body’s spaces, stretching her esophagus with his bulk until her throat bulged with him, until not a drop of air could pass through, but there was no discomfort at all.

 _Magic,_ she thought deliriously.

 _Cheating four-dimensional physics,_ he allowed, and fucked her throat in perfect tandem with her ass and pussy. Her breathing adjusted around the rhythm of his thrusts, so seamlessly he must have had a hand in it. But she couldn’t hold onto any curiosity about it. All that stayed on her mind now was the relentless, all-encompassing onslaught of sensation, of _pleasure_.

Filled in every orifice, tentacles rubbing or caressing her every sensitive spot, cradled in a bed of warm limbs as gentle as the softest silk sheets, nothing but the taste and smell and feel of him to focus on, the rest of the world fell away. Past and future stopped existing. Her fear and pain and helplessness disappeared. There was just here and now, herself, her husband, and how good they felt.

She felt like she was floating, dreaming. She felt like she couldn’t possibly take any more, and she never wanted to _stop_ taking more. Was she coming yet? Had she been coming for the last fifteen minutes? She was screaming around him without sound, writhing, bucking and clenching and whining, and Garcia filled her up with his cocks and his come and his love and his care, and Lorena wept and came and came until she blacked out.

When she drifted back into true wakefulness, she was in her bed, tucked under the covers. Garcia had cleaned and dressed her, she’d been aware of that much. Now he sat cross-legged beside her, his back to the bedside lamp, rubbing one of her wrists. She could see the beginnings of a ring of bruises blooming on her skin. His grip hadn’t hurt at any point, but with the way she’d writhed and bucked and pulled, it was hardly surprising.

It sent a happy shiver down her spine to realize she’d carry the evidence of this night for... a nice long while, probably. Finally the long-sleeves-at-all-times cold of the bunker was good for something. Maybe she’d ask for him to mark her deliberately, next time. This was a good thing to be reminded of.

"Hey," Garcia rasped. "How are you?"

"Wonderful," she sighed. "That was perfect. Thank you, Garcia. Thank you so much."

"Anything, Lorena. Anything for you."

She opened her arms, and he climbed under the covers with her and cradled her to him. When she leaned up to kiss him, she realized his face was wet with tears.

"Hey, no, no no no, don’t cry, honey, don’t cry," she babbled, feeling her own eyes well up in response as she cradled and wiped at his face, still a little loopy and overstimulated.

He shook his head and covered her hand with his own. "It’s fine. I feel fine. I just need to get them out of my system, I think."

"Okay. That’s – of course. Whatever _you_ need too, you know that."

Nodding, he buried his face in her neck. She rearranged them to pull him on top of her, his warm body a comforting weight as he let it all out against her chest. He cried openly, garbling _‘I love you, I love you, I missed you so much’_ s as she petted his hair, rubbed his shaking shoulders, and murmured soothing nonsense. Eventually his sobs slowed and stopped, and his breathing evened out. He kissed her breastbone before settling by her side, an arm draped around her waist.

"I love you too," she whispered. "More than words can say."

"Thank you. I think I needed tonight as badly as you did," he whispered back.

A lot more, Lorena imagined, but they were both so worn out she figured they could do without going into that. Instead she asked: "Could you really have done it?"

"Done what?"

"Keep me from being found while we were going at it out there."

"Of course," he said earnestly. "I had everybody’s bedroom doors barricaded. They couldn’t have turned the knobs if they tried."

Lorena couldn’t help but laugh. "Oh, man. And here I thought you were bluffing and your big rescue would’ve involved wrapping that blanket around me really fast and yelling a lot."

Garcia looked at her like she’d grown a second head. "You thought _that_ was all I could do for you if things went wrong and you still let me fuck you the way I did?"

"It worked." Shrugging, she smiled. "It was exactly what I needed."

"I can’t believe you," he said fondly. "I don’t deserve you."

"Shut up, of course you do."

She kissed him sweetly, leaned over him to turn off the bedside lamp, and slept better than she had in weeks, his warmth never leaving her side.

A few nights later, Garcia was leafing through one of Lucy’s history books in his pyjamas, waiting for Lorena to join him in bed, when she knocked on their door and guided Iris inside.

"Tata?" she said. "Iris has something she wants to tell you."

He looked between them, putting the book aside. "Really? What’s that, sweetie?"

Iris bit her lip, hesitating. Lorena placed her hands comfortingly on her daughter’s shoulders and whispered, "Go on."

"Mama told me you’re scared," she said eventually.

Garcia’s eyebrows rose. "Of what?"

"That –" Iris sniffled. "That I don’t love you anymore or I’m scared of you because sometimes you have to hurt the bad people to protect us."

Garcia’s expression shuttered. The face he presented to Iris was firmly locked into Neutral Dad Range, but when he shot Lorena a quick look, she could see the turmoil in his eyes.

"Why would mama tell you such an awful thing?"

Sparing Iris the trial of having to untangle and put it to words all over again, Lorena said: "Because _Iris_ was scared that _you_ didn’t love her anymore, and you’d left her with grandmama because you kept getting hurt protecting her and it was too much trouble for you."

The blandly supportive mask cracked with anguish. "What? No, sweetie, no, of course not."

He got up out of bed and pulled Iris into his arms, lifting her to his chest. Her little arms and legs wrapped around him, and she buried her face in his shoulder. He shot Lorena such a lost, tormented look, she had a hard time keeping it dry all over again, just like when Iris came clean to her. She rubbed his arm and nodded encouragingly.

Cradling her head in his large hand, he pressed a hard kiss to Iris’s hair. "I could never stop loving you, sweetie. Me getting hurt was never your fault. The reason I asked grandmama to take care of you was because I was afraid you’d get hurt if I kept you with me all the time."

"I know. Mama told me and that made me feel better," Iris said, sniffling.

"Well, I’ll tell you again, okay?" he said emphatically. "So you feel twice as better. I’ll always love you, all I wanted was to keep you safe. I’ll tell you as many times as you need."

"Mama said you would." Iris looked up. "That’s why I want to tell you too, tata. I’m not scared of you, and I’ll never stop loving you either. I’ll tell you as many times as it takes to make you stop feeling so sad all the time. Mama told me about self defense and how people still feel bad after. But don’t feel bad anymore, okay? I love you and I’m not afraid of you."

Tears rolled down Garcia’s face. Iris reached up with her little hand to wipe them away.

"I love you and I’m not afraid of you. I love you and I’m not afraid of you. I love you and I’m not afraid of you."

He closed his eyes and pressed her hand to his cheek. "Thank you, sweetheart."

"I’m only afraid when you get hurt, or when you leave without saying goodbye. It makes me feel like you’re never coming back."

"I’m so sorry. I never meant to make you feel that way. I won’t leave you like that again."

"And you won’t get hurt anymore?"

Garcia let out a watery laugh. "I don’t do that on purpose, but I’ll try my hardest. Pinky swear."

"Okay." In a small voice, Iris asked: "Can I sleep here with you tonight? Like when I was little, before mama died?"

 _Oh, baby, you’re_ still _so little,_ Lorena thought, heart clenching in her chest.

"Of course you can," she said hoarsely.

Garcia smiled through his tears and thumbed Iris’s nose. "You didn’t think we’d let you leave, did you?"

For the rest of their stay in the bunker, their daughter slept in between them more often than not. And they wouldn’t have had it any other way.


	6. #@%!ing Roommates

_Give me the courage to change what I can and the strength to endure what I cannot change,_ became Lorena’s motto over the next few months.

On the one hand, Lorena thought, the years of Iris’s life and development she’d missed would probably haunt her forever. On the other hand, it soon became frighteningly easy to forget anything had changed. Iris was still her little girl, her baby, from the smell of her hair and her ten perfect little fingers and toes, to the sound of her laughter and her little pout of concentration.

Garcia harbored a not insignificant amount of residual guilt and anxiety about raising Iris in her absence as if her resurrection was a given, because if there was ever a promise that could have backfired catastrophically, it was that. But Lorena couldn’t be more grateful. Iris had been waiting for her to come home all this time, she and Garcia had been living accordingly, and now that they were indeed reunited, Iris treated it like coming back from a very long (if not very pleasant) summer camp. Garcia had gotten her a diary early on, which meant she now had years worth of meticulously recorded stories to share and gripes to air, and had done so without the slightest hesitation.

"The more I think about it, the more I wonder how you did it," Lorena whispered. Iris had fallen asleep in her lap on the bunker couch halfway through watching _Moana_ for the millionth time, and Lorena couldn’t stop running her fingers through her silky-fine hair.

"Your guess is as good as mine," Garcia whispered back. "A terminal case of tunnel vision, a willing subject, and... I don’t know either. I really don’t."

She studied him in the flickering lights of anachronistically grainy Disney. He looked drawn and grim, even on nights like these. Like he had sometimes when he came back from especially long or grueling campaigns. The fight against Rittenhouse and the continued friction within the team were wearing on him.

"How about we tuck Iris in, have a nightcap, and call it a day?" Lorena said.

"Let’s." Garcia stood and helped her get up off the couch without dropping Iris. "You good here, Connor?"

"I’ll finish this, if you don’t mind," Connor said, voice wobbly. They refrained from commenting on the glassy eyes and rapid blinking as he watched Moana sing through her reunion with her grandmother and the village ancestors. They’d been there themselves plenty of times. Though maybe sans the bottle of scotch clutched to his chest like a lifeline.

Garcia clapped him on the shoulder and handed him the remote. "TV’s all yours."

They tucked Iris into her bed in the smallest room, quickly knocked back some vodka in the kitchen while Connor pretended not to cry into his drink over a cartoon volcano, and retreated to their bunk. There was no lock on the door, because of course not. At least Garcia ominously waving the journal around had gotten them ahead of the shortage of beds that plagued the bunker last timeline around, but there still wasn’t even a lock on the _bathroom_ door. In many ways, this place was a parody of itself that even past-future Lucy’s many pages of complaining in the journal hadn’t prepared them for.

They’d just have to make do.

The springs of the set of unforgiving military cots they called a bed squeaked with every toss or turn, and especially with every bounce, but they could work around that too. A barrier of tentacles between the mattress and the bedframe worked wonders. And Garcia had always said he could practically turn off sensation to his extradimensional extremities entirely, so. Lorena trusted him not to be hurting himself.

"It’s definitely not the most comfortable position I’ve ever had sex in, but it’ll do," he told her.

He was on top of her, his weight pressing her down and his heat suffusing her skin. For now, all they were doing was kissing and maximizing skin contact. Well, ‘skin’ contact; they were both still fully dressed. It didn’t matter. Her arms were around his back and her legs tangled in his and his mouth on hers, and they had all night to work up to the main event.

Both of their breaths were growing heavier and more erratic, little sounds of pleasure and need escaping their throats, when a sharp sob rent the air. They froze. For a few moments, the only sound was the ever-present whirr of the ventilation system. Then there was another sob.

"Is that Connor?" Lorena whispered.

"Yeah. The movie must’ve really gotten to him."

She mimed pouring a bottle down her throat, and he winced even as he chuckled.

"Poor guy," she sighed. "He doesn’t have anyone the way we have each other, does he?"

Garcia made a rumbling noise and nuzzled at her throat. But it was hard to get back into the groove with the sounds of Connor crying his drunken heart out over a Disney movie, carrying so loudly through the hallways of the bunker it was like he was right outside their door.

And then the sounds got even louder and closer. They looked at each other in alarm in the light of their bedside lamp. Connor’s room was not in this direction. Surely he wasn’t...?

He was.

Their door creaked open, and Connor stumbled inside, wailing. Garcia quickly rolled off of her. Moments later, Connor dropped face-first across their laps.

"Why can’t _I_ remember who I am?" he blubbered. "I want to be a beautiful green island again toooooo."

 _Oh, god,_ Lorena and Garcia told each other with a look.

Half an hour later, Connor had passed out and taken up both of their beds in the process, and they were back on the couch with all the spare blankets they could find.

"I don’t think we should have sex in that bed," Garcia said, staring into the middle distance.

"We’ve had sex in it before," Lorena pointed out.

"Yes, but that was... an unusual occasion. I wasn’t thinking about who might walk in. Nor was I exactly trying to make you scream, which I would very much have liked to do tonight. How would you feel about being gagged again?"

She took a moment to consider. "It was great that one time, but honestly, as a regular occurrence, I don’t think it would work. I think I need to be in a pretty specific mood to enjoy that. Which I’m not in right now. Nor have I been at any point tonight."

"I figured as much. Then there’s the need to manually barricade doors when we want any privacy..."

"Please don’t. It was a bad idea then and it’s a bad idea now. Imagine waking up, needing to pee, and finding yourself locked in with no explanation. In _our_ circumstances."

"Oh, I agree. I was thinking about just our own door this time. Though even that much is something I think _I_ need to be in a specific mood for to keep it from to being a boner-killer."

"Remind me again why we had to go live in this bunker?" Lorena said.

"Lots of reasons," Garcia said. "All of them annoying."

Ironically, the common room felt like it provided more privacy than their lockless bedroom did after that. And of course Iris slept with them there more often than not. So instead of in their bed, they made their next attempt on the couch.

Emphasis on ‘attempt’.

They got Iris to bed on schedule, but everybody else in the bunker seemed determined to unknowingly thwart them. First, Jiya and Rufus kept mucking around on the time machine terminals until one in the morning. When Jiya finally went to bed, claiming that sleep deprivation made her visions harder to manage, Rufus got roped into a game of cards with Wyatt. Meanwhile, Lucy and Connor were drinking steadily. Not feeling like making her impending hangover even worse, Lucy mercifully peeled off after getting Connor a second bottle. Connor’s liver was better trained, so he stuck around and engaged Lorena and Flynn in a conversation about interdimensionality that became less mutually intelligible with every sip Connor took and every attempt he and Garcia made to cross-reference the latter’s personal experience with the former’s knowledge of what science currently thought it knew about quantum physics.

 _"You’ve explained this to me much better in the past,"_ Lorena murmured to Garcia in Croatian at one point.

 _"Yes, but his mad science has ruined our lives once before. I’m not about to give him ammunition to do it a second time,"_ Garcia muttered back.

Rufus and Wyatt had to carry Connor to bed in the end, already snoring. That was a relief, at least; there would be no repeat of the post- _Moana_ incident. But Rufus and Wyatt came back, broke out the beer, and kept talking over the movie Lorena and Garcia pretended to watch until almost three o’clock.

Finally, after muttering half-hearted and three-quarter illegible goodnights, they stumbled off. Clutching Garcia’s hand, Lorena leaned her head against the back of the couch as they listened to them move through their bathroom routines. Then to the screech of one door, and another. Then to the silence that followed.

"I think we’re in the clear," Garcia whispered eventually.

Grinning, Lorena rolled herself into his lap and captured his mouth with hers. He met her kiss with equal passion. His hands slipped under her sweater, and two narrow tentacles hooked into the waistband of her pants and began to slowly slide them down her hips.

She hissed against his mouth. "Cold."

A new tentacle or two pulled one of the blankets they kept around for warmth up around their shoulders.

"Better," she grinned, and resumed kissing him senseless.

His big, warm hands found the clasp of her bra, unhooked it, and engulfed her breasts. Groaning appreciatively, she ground her hips into his. This position was not conductive to getting her pants off, but her ass was hanging out now, and a tentacle slid down her front to find her clit.

A door screeched on its hinges.

Lorena and Garcia froze.

Footsteps resounded through the breathless hush of the bunker. Lorena threw herself to the side and pulled her pants back into place, and Garcia’s tentacles poofed out of existence. He pulled his hands from her sweater and used them to keep their blanket in place.

"Hey," Lucy croaked. "Still up?"

They looked around as if only noticing her presence now.

"Hey," they said, and "Yes," and "We were watching a movie," and several things even more inane.

"Well, at least that’s a fun reason," Lucy said, smiling at them tiredly, wrapping herself in the other blanket, and making herself comfortable in the armchair. "I just can’t sleep. I don’t think I’ve slept through the night since we set up shop here."

Lorena and Garcia exchanged a longsuffering look, but after some quick telepathy decided to wait Lucy out. Insomnia or no, she couldn’t stay awake forever, and they couldn’t exactly go back to their bunk to have sex, because Iris was there. They _could_ resort to going to the glorified closet Iris kept her stuff and seldom-used bed in, but Lucy would still be awake to hear them anyway. And it would feel way too weird.

They ended up falling asleep on the couch and cursing themselves and everyone else in the bunker for it in the morning.

The bathroom, at least, came with a system. If the chair was outside the door, you kept walking and stayed the hell out unless you were literally in the process of losing bodily fluids everywhere you went. So. The bathroom.

They lounged in bed for half the morning, waiting for everyone else to take their turn showering and dressing. Iris drifted in and out, feeling very mature for helping her parents make breakfast in bed for all three of them. Eventually, Lorena and Garcia took a pile of towels, put the chair out, and triumphantly closed the bathroom door behind them. They were just trying to determine what the least uncomfortable and fungus-riddled spot to have sex would be when Rufus started cursing up a storm outside.

"Again?! Seriously, people, I have been waiting for my turn for almost three hours now!"

They looked at each other and let out a mutual silent groan. _Seriously_ , was right. How could they have miscounted such a small number? What asshole had gone twice?

"Who’s in there _now?_ " Rufus demanded.

"It’s just me," Lorena and Garcia said simultaneously. And then they slapped their foreheads simultaneously.

"I sincerely hope I heard that right and you’re Flynn and Flynn, because infidelity drama is the last thing this bunker needs."

"Yes, Rufus, this is Flynn and Flynn," Lorena sighed.

"Nobody down here is cheating on anyone, you weirdo," Garcia said with far less patience.

"Awesome." The chair scraped along the floor. "I’ll wait for you to finish, then."

"Seriously?" they snapped in unison.

"Yep."

"Rufus, come on," Lorena whined.

"Waiting anywhere else hasn’t worked so far. And besides, if you’re not having affairs with others in there, how long could you two possibly take? I wish everybody would just double up like a married couple, I would’ve been clean an hour ago."

"So you don’t care about privacy. Good to know," Garcia said ominously.

"Hey, man, what are you doing?" asked Wyatt, out of nowhere.

"Waiting for the Flynns to stop canoodling," Rufus answered.

"We are not canoodling!" Garcia shouted.

"You’re not showering either!"

Lucy, this time: "Hey. Who are you waiting for?"

"The Flynns," Rufus said again. "They’re canoodling."

"You’d know by now if we were canoodling, Rufus," Lorena said, angrily depositing her pile of towels on the low wall that poorly pretended to provide privacy by dividing the room in half, and snatching her toiletry bag from Garcia’s hands instead. "This petri dish has no soundproofing to speak of."

"Of course you’d say that if you wanted to throw people off the trail of your conjugal visits," Rufus said.

"Well," Garcia muttered with a venomous look at the door, and forcefully started the nearest shower. "At least _somebody_ down here admits it’s practically jail."

Lorena could barely believe she had to make a chore chart again. Before the bunker, she and Garcia just took turns with anything that needed doing, and Iris had been small enough that her only duty was putting her toys and clothes away when she was done with them. Now it was like being back in college. And sure, Rufus and Jiya were young enough to count as barely _out_ of college, but Lucy and Connor were forces of pure chaos, Garcia had developed a vindictive ‘them first’ streak, and ever since the boys had taken that trip to prevent Wyatt’s wife’s murderer from being born and The Jessica Situation started, Wyatt had become even more of a mess in even more ways than Lorena had uncharitably attributed to him at first.

At least everybody remembered The Jessica Situation was a recent phenomenon, which was more than could be said for most of the other changes Rittenhouse and the Mothership had caused to history. Garcia’s interdimensional superpowers at work again, like they had been when he came to get Lorena. Not just his immunity to the detrimental effects of traveling within your own timeline; he knew a conveniently located portal to jump to both times, too. And just like sticking half of himself through a portal equalized the difference in how fast time flowed for him in the different worlds, throwing himself from one point in time to another point in time from a portal – any portal – somehow caused him to equalize the time difference between those portals. Meaning history changed for every millimeter of this plane of existence _except_ inside those portals.

The techies on the team went absolutely ballistic over that discovery. Nobody had quite connected the dots when Garcia and Jiya went to pick up Lorena, because her disappearance so close to her previous murder had just prompted Rittenhouse to adjust its strategy and plant some other kind of false evidence to frame Garcia with. His resulting quest to protect Iris, save Lorena, and make Rittenhouse pay for what ‘they’ had done to her had played out so similarly to when she was murdered, nobody had noticed the difference or had any reason to think look into it. Now, though, Connor, Jiya and Rufus’s heads might catch on fire from all the excitement and inspired breakthroughs.

Of course, being so preoccupied with other things meant they paid even less attention to the hygienic standards of their environment. At least being a bartender meant Jessica understood Lorena’s pain and twitchy eye. They drew up the chart together, and Jess agreed to help hound anyone who slacked off about their uncooperative disgustingness. Finally put the morning sickness and accompanying oversensitivity to smells to good use, she’d quipped.

Lorena couldn’t help but feel for her. She and Garcia had been talking about maybe having another baby before the age difference with Iris became too great, but they hadn’t gotten around to it yet when Rittenhouse happened. She could only imagine how Jess was feeling, coming ‘back’ to a husband who didn’t remember knocking her up – and was having a major existential freak-out about it.

Today was Lorena’s turn to do laundry. The washing machine and dryer dated back to the fifties. It was a small miracle they still worked. They were noisy and rumbly and made the lights in the entire bunker flicker when you turned both on at the same time. They also brought back a lot of fond memories. And in related news, they were perfect camouflage.

"I’m doing laundry," she whispered in Garcia’s ear, and gave him the most sultry look she was capable of while leaning over the back of the common room couch with an overflowing laundry basket on her hip.

Which was _very_ sultry.

Garcia met her eyes over his shoulder, his gaze heated. A tentacle curled around her ankle, and they silently worked out their ‘we are not horny teenagers, we are horny _adults_ , we can be discreet’ strategy.

Lorena made her way to the laundry closet with no spring in her step, no furtive looks, and only the faintest heat in her cheeks. There, a tentacle joined her, and once she had the whites loaded into the washing machine, Garcia headed in the other direction and made a circuit around the bunker before joining her. She threw her arms around his neck, and he wasted no time picking her up and sitting her down on the washer.

Not that it mattered, because time was up before they could get even a kiss in, anyway. The door banged open and Wyatt crab-walked in, his elbow still following the trajectory of the door handle and his arms full of sheets and blankets. Lorena and Garcia flew apart, her practically rolling off the washer and him tripping over his own feet. By the time Wyatt looked up, Lorena had her hands on the washing machine like she was under arrest, and Garcia was holding onto the wall in the most unconvincing casual lean of his life. But Wyatt looked just as caught in the act as they were feeling.

"Uh," he said, looking between them with wide eyes. "Hi."

"Hi," they chorused.

Wyatt looked at the rumbling washing machine. "Well, damn. I was hoping these could... uh..."

"They can, no problem," Lorena said with forced cheer. "Just come back in three or four hours."

"Uh, yeah, of course," he said. He awkwardly shuffled backward. "I’ll take this back to our room in the meantime, then."

"No, don’t be silly, there’s plenty of room here."

"No! No, don’t worry, I’ll take care of it. Just leave it up to me or Jess, okay, this falls outside your duties."

"Okay," she chirped.

"Okay." He nodded stiffly, barely meeting their eyes. "Thanks."

And he walked away, closing the door behind him with his foot.

Lorena eyed the area around the door handle.

"Does _this_ door have a working lock?" she asked.

"On the outside," Garcia growled.

"Well, can you –" She waggled her arms, imitating tentacles. Then she sighed and dropped them. "No, never mind. They’d just unlock it, and get suspicious if they couldn’t."

Garcia dragged his hands down his face in frustration. "You know Jess was washing their bedding two days ago, when it was my turn, too? They’re having sex non-stop because they don’t care who hears them, while we can’t find ten damn minutes of privacy anywhere!"

A young JFK got unexpectedly dragged into the bunker, and even more unexpectedly, broke out of it. Lorena and Lucy had a great time bonding as they, Rufus and Jiya chased the kid around the Bay Area. It only took one freudian slip for them to take a good, real look at each other at long last and start venting all their mutual frustrations about Wyatt, bunker life, Wyatt and Jessica’s sex life, the direction their lives had taken, and Wyatt. Making one-night-stands far more awkward than they needed to be and leaving Lorena’s husband behind in a past filled with armed Rittenhouse goons notwithstanding, Wyatt didn’t really deserve half of what they said about him that evening. But sometimes the only way to get such feelings out of your system was to air them to like-minded people.

That night, when Garcia was back, Lorena led him out of their bedroom on her tiptoes and showed him the ventilation shaft JFK had escaped through. In all the commotion, nobody had thought to close up or secure it yet.

"Freedom!" he whisper-cheered, shaking his fists.

"Privacy!" she whispered back, spreading her arms wide.

He kissed her hard and followed closely behind as she crawled into the vent. The passage was dirty and cramped, especially for him, but within minutes they reached another loose grate and emerged into the fresh, cool night air. Lorena got to her feet, dusted herself off, and tilted her head up to the stars. Garcia unfolded himself after her and stepped up beside her, turning in a circle to look around the wooded slope the bunker was built into and the Bay Area stretching out below.

"I never thought I could miss modern light pollution so much," he said, pointing to the city in the distance.

Lorena followed his gaze to the glittering tapestry of lights and breathed, "Tell me about it."

She’d gotten plenty of city and wide open space while tracking down JFK earlier, though, and Garcia went outside on jumps all the time. So without wasting too much more time, they fell into each other’s arms and stumbled into the trees, lips locked and hands roaming.

...and from one step and inch of skin to the next, they tripped the proximity alarm.

Agent Christopher was pissed. Lorena and Garcia were still sexually frustrated. It balanced each other out, in a horrible kind of way.

Which, honestly, only left the Mothership. Where else could they still try? Nowhere, that’s where.

But of course, just when shirts were coming off and they were getting somewhere, the jump alarm went off.

Lorena let out a scream of frustration.

By the time Jiya opened the hatch, they were dressed and yelling half-remembered Croatian song lyrics at each other. Jiya almost stumbled backwards off the rolling stairs in her surprise.

"What are you two doing in here?!" she cried out.

" _Trying_ to have a _private_ conversation for _once_ ," Lorena snapped.

"Oh, we were having a _conversation_ now?" Garcia scoffed. "That’s a funny way to describe you lecturing me about everyt–"

"Hey!" Jiya interjected, throwing up her hands to shush them both. "I don’t know if you’d noticed, but Rittenhouse just jumped. We need to go. Get out."

"Oh no, I’m going. But _sweetheart_ , yes, please get out," Garcia said, voice hard. He only put any emotion into his voice when Lorena jumped up out of her seat and started stomping off. "We’ll talk when I get back, alright?"

"Fine," she bit out. Then she whirled on him, pointed an accusing finger, and said in Croatian: _"Don’t you dare die this time of all the times and leave me with this ruse as our so-called last conversation, Garcia."_

 _"I won’t,"_ he promised. _"I love you."_

She took a deep, bracing breath. _"I love you too."_

"We could just have sex again, the way everybody else is, and give them their damn show," Lorena grumbled, flat on her back with her arms crossed over the covers.

Jessica was having another orgasm in the next room. A damn good one, from the sounds of it. Lorena remembered what that was like, with the pregnancy hormones raging through her and Garcia more enamored of her body than ever before.

She was jealous. The complete opposite of aroused, but jealous.

"We could, but exhibitionism is a big no for me," Garcia said humorlessly.

"No, me too. But it’s getting real tempting anyway, you know?"

"Oh, do I ever."

" _Vengeance._ Maybe pick a fight first, so their dislike is fresh again and having to listen to us is extra unpleasant."

"Stop," he groaned. He pulled her into his arms, their duvets folded in at least three layers between them. "Keep going like that like that and you’ll be tormenting _me_ with our inability to put those beautiful words into action."

 _"Vengeanccccce,"_ she hissed theatrically, and turned on her side. Both to face him and burrow into his cuddles, and so she could fold her pillow around both ears and still have a hand left to curl into his.

And then – _and then!_

In an unprecedented turn of events, they got the bunker all to themselves for the day. Rittenhouse jumped again. Garcia would have gone after them – he _always_ went – but only days before, a Rittenhouse sleeper they’d brought back to the bunker for interrogation had broken loose, gotten his hands on one of their guns, and shot open a heating pipe, leaving Lorena with burns across her back and shoulder. Nothing life-threatening or probably even permanently scarring, but painful and incapacitating nonetheless. He wouldn’t leave her behind in that state, and so he voluntarily sat out a mission for the first time.

Jiya, Wyatt, Lucy, and Jessica went on the jump, which Lucy thought was most likely to a vital suffragette march. ("We’re really letting the highly pregnant woman come on a jump to fight Rittenhouse with us?!" several members of the team had asked. And yes, apparently they were.) Iris was on a nice, safe sleep-over at grandma’s for the weekend, and Rufus, Connor, and Agent Christopher were off to secure the materials and energy source they needed to implement a piece of groundbreaking, portal-inspired new tech that could, theoretically, shield their entire base from the effects of the timeline changing while the Mothership was gone.

Garcia secured Lorena’s back and shoulders with tentacles full of suckers. They latched onto her chest and left arm and helped lock her upper body into a comfortable position as she rode him. It wasn’t as spectacular or even happy as they’d been looking forward to the past few weeks, but it was good. She could run her hands down his arms and chest and through his hair, and he could lean up to kiss her and mouth at her breasts.

They had all the time and space they’d been itching for. No need to rush; he could roll his hips up into her, and she down onto him, for as long as they liked. They made love until her entire belly was filled with pleasure, until her chest was, until her skin felt tight with it, only pausing when Garcia threatened to come too soon. And only when Lorena felt full to bursting did a tentacle latch its sucker onto her clit and push her over the edge, dragging him with her.

As the high of orgasm faded, the tentacles lowered her to his chest. They cleaned up a bit with a washcloth brought by an ambulatory tentacle, arranged themselves against each other, careful of her healing skin, and dozed off.

They probably should have seen it coming that, two hours later, while they were having coffee and Garcia was using his tentacles to cook for the entire team just in case, the Mothership returned and expelled a Jessica in old-timey handcuffs, a Wyatt and Jiya who were practically having a fistfight over the aforementioned, and a Lucy who stumbled out of the time machine, fell to her knees, and promptly went into full-blown extradimensional vortex of sensory chaos mode. Because that was just what their lives had turned into lately.


End file.
